Anni Vehmas

Turku Centre for Biotechnology
Supervisor: Garry Corthals
Funding: other
Date: 2008-11-12

Integration of translational datasets for the discovery of endometriosis biomarkers

Endometriosis is a common benign gynecological condition causing chronic pelvic pain and subfertility. Currently both the clinical diagnosis and the curative treatment of endometriosis involve surgical procedures. Therefore new and targeted therapy as well as noninvasive diagnosis for endometriosis would be of crucial importance. Thus the initial goal for the study is to identify and define novel protein and peptide biomarkers in endometriotic tissues, endometrium and peritoneal fluid with three disparate proteomic methods validated in a preliminary study. This information will be fused to existing microarray and clinical information for each patient to study the regulation of the biological systems behind the disease. The candidate markers will be validated on a larger set of patient samples from body fluids with high throughput screening methods. This approach is novel in both, its scope and level of molecular information for endometriosis that will be acquired, as well as the deployment of novel bioinformatics approaches to integrate large disease specific datasets.