"Evaluation of extracellular vesicle-associated TGF-β as a biomarker in patients with endometriosis" in Meeting abstracts of the 3° EVIta symposium

Endometriosis is a common chronic gynecological disease characterized by the presence of endometrial-like tissue growing outside the uterine cavity. In many patients, it causes debilitating painful symptoms, thus worsening the quality of life and causing recourse to chronic medical therapy and, eventually, surgery. To date, the diagnostic gold standard remains minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery followed by histological confirmation, but extensive research aims to identify a non-invasive serological marker useful for diagnosis or prediction of the severity; in this regard, studies are also focusing on plasma extracellular vesicles (EVs). This work aims to evaluate whether the EV-associated TGF-β (Transforming Growth Factor-β) can be used as a diagnostic biomarker for this pathology; TGF-β, indeed, appears to play a key role in the development of endometriosis. To this end, 8 endometriosis patients and 8 controls were initially recruited, from whom blood samples were collected; the plasma EVs were isolated by differential centrifugation and ultracentrifugation. EVs were characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), and western blot for the common EV-associated marker CD63. EV-associated TGF-β levels were quantified by ELISA. The EVs characterization confirmed their identity; the NTA analysis did not highlight any differences either in terms of size or concentration between patients and controls. Nevertheless, the quantification of EVassociated TGF-β highlighted a trend towards higher levels in patients than controls. Although the number of subjects analyzed was limited, these preliminary data suggest that, in endometriosis patients, EVs could be characterized by a higher TGF-β level than in healthy subjects, encouraging further studies.