This cellular atlas could lead to breakthroughs for endometriosis patients

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Endometriosis may affect more than 10 percent of reproductive aged women. It's a major cause of infertility and can increase a person's risk for ovarian cancer. Getty Images hide caption

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Endometriosis may affect more than 10 percent of reproductive aged women. It's a major cause of infertility and can increase a person's risk for ovarian cancer.

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Dr. Kate Lawrenson's research is granular. As a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and co-director of the Women's Cancer Research program at Cedars-Sinai, she spends her days analyzing individual cells. It may sound tedious, but it's this kind of fine grain work that's led to many breakthroughs in cancer research.

Lawrenson hopes that this approach will lead to breakthroughs in a different disease — endometriosis. Endometriosis is caused by endometrial-like tissue growing outside of the uterus. It affects more than 10% of reproductive-aged women, is a major cause of infertility and can increase a person's risk for ovarian cancer.

Despite being incredibly common, endometriosis remains a mystery to researchers. So much so that diagnosis can take years. Even then, there's currently no cure for endometriosis, only treatments to manage the symptoms.

However, with the help of single-cell genomics technology, Kate Lawrenson and her team of researchers are paving the way for a brighter future for endometriosis patients. They've created a cellular atlas—essentially a cell information database—to serve as a resource for endometriosis research. To do this, the team analyzed nearly 400,000 individual cells from patients.

"This has been a real game changer for diseases such as endometriosis, where there are lots of different cell types conspiring to cause that disease," Lawrenson said. She and her team hope that this molecular information could lead to better, quicker diagnoses, as well as identify the patients who are most at risk.

Because of the lack of data and understanding around endometriosis, the disease has historically yielded stories of undiagnosed cases and patients being "medically gaslit," meaning their symptoms are dismissed or minimized by health care providers.

But Dr. Lawrenson says that these days, she's noticing more discussion of endometriosis and other diseases that have historically received lower research funding among her peers, by medical institutions and in popular media. She senses a changing tide in the way health care professionals think about and study endometriosis. "I've been in research for, I think, 18 years now, and I've seen a big change in that time. So hopefully the next 18 years will really see differences in how we understand and we process and how we can treat it more effectively and diagnose it more efficiently," she said.

This episode was produced by Margaret Cirino and Carly Rubin. It was edited by managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and Willa Rubin. It was fact-checked by Will Chase and Emily Kwong. Gilly Moon was the audio engineer.