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[Female Speaker]
All right, wonderful, thank you Dr. Taylor for your time. I wonder if you could elaborate please briefly on stem cells as a novel cause of endometriosis.
[Dr. Taylor]
Well, clearly they contribute to endometriosis. I think they play a role in all endometriosis but definitely some of the odd forms of endometriosis that we never had an explanation for, how does endometriosis get to the lung or the brain. They play a role, they probably are the main cause of some of these unusual forms of endometriosis. They clearly are a new etiology of endometriosis. My hope is that as we go forward we can find ways to modify the migration of these stem cells to find what recruits them to certain tissues, to find what makes them differentiate from undifferentiated stem cells to endometrial cells. What drives this whole process and maybe potentially treat or reverse some forms of endometriosis through hope that this could be a huge benefit as we understand it further. We are just still in our infancy in understanding what the role of stem cells is in endometriosis.
[Female Speaker]
That is fantastic. Now are you finding any specific areas where the stem cells are becoming more advanced than others?
[Dr. Taylor]
No we have not got into that point yet where we have defined exactly what recruits them, we are looking now and we are starting to find that certain tissue injury, things like smoking may help recruit, I should not say help but recruit these cells in a bad way to areas that they should not normally, they divert them from the uterus to these ectopic locations. So as we learn more about that, hopefully we’ll find more about what makes them differentiate in that way, what makes some endometriosis worse than others, what makes some endometriosis recruit more stem cells, grow more aggressively and where others become still quiescent and fail to continue to recruit these stem cells.
[Female Speaker]
Okay, wonderful sir, thank you. Great presentation, thank you. Thank you so much for speaking to me.
[Dr. Taylor]
Thank you.
[Female Speaker]
I wonder if you could weigh in on tissue engineering as it relates to endometriosis?
[Male Speaker]
Absolutely. Tissue engineering is another tool to be able to study the disease since the disease does not spontaneously grow in any animal model other than baboons or other monkeys. It is difficult for us to study it, so using tissue engineering we can grow a model in the lab that really replicates what is going on in the human.
[Female Speaker]
Oh, fantastic! And if you could, perhaps elaborate and share some other wonderful things that you are doing in the gynepathology lab?
[Male Speaker]
In the gynepathology lab Dr. Linda Griffith who is the director of this center has been able to use techniques that have been employed for tissue engineering, for drug development toxicity studies and employ them for the study of endometriosis where we take many, many different problems, use mathematical modelling to try to come up with a simplified answers really understanding endometriosis. It has been phenomenal.
[Female Speaker]
Wonderful sir. Thank you for your time.
[Male Speaker]
It is a pleasure.
[Female Speaker]
Your presentation was phenomenal this morning. So thank you so much for coming. So I spoke with Dr. Isaacson earlier about tissue engineering. I wonder if you could give us your insight into it as well.
[Female Speaker 1]
So there are some terrific advances coming from many areas of engineering that led us try to build actual tissues and organs and culture that capture the complexity or more of the complexity that we now have from basic cell cultures. So we bring together biomaterials, microfluidics together with quantitative cell biology to try to build much more complicated 3D tissues. That will let us study phenomena that are important in endometriosis using human tissue in culture and to complement things that are done in animal studies.
[Female Speaker]
So as we are looking forward into the future what would be your ultimate, what are you looking forward to seeing or perhaps working on?
[Female Speaker 1]
So two things, we are trying to recreate facets of the endometrium and of how cells in the peritoneum cavity interact with the peritoneum. So we can understand how lesions grow and where they come from. That provides platforms that drug companies can use to do better identification of targets for drugs because the drugs we have are not as effective as we like. Okay.
[Female Speaker]
Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time.