New therapies

Major medical need

Due to the observed estrogen-dependent pathophysiology of endometriosis, therapeutic developments have been primarily focused on hormone targets. However, since endometriosis remains a chronic disease of unknown etiology, current therapies only address the symptoms and not the root causes. As a result, disease recurrence is frequent and concerns up to 40% of the patients. This high relapse rate poses a major medical need for the treatment of endometriosis.

The side effects, mode of administration, waning efficacy, and high costs of the current therapies represent a major burden for patients. Side effects such as bone loss, hot flashes, hair loss, and breakthrough bleeding can cause women to discontinue therapy.

Additionally, given the estrogen-dependent nature of endometriosis, current hormonal therapies disrupt the ovarian and endometrial estrogen pathways, which regulate key aspects of fertility. As a consequence these treatments prevent conception.

There is a considerable unmet need for novel non-hormonal targeted therapies that would

• relieve pain symptoms without frequent side effects associated with current treatments,
• allow the normal menstrual cycle to continue, and ideally provide for the possibility of pregnancy during treatment and
• prevent disease recurrence by targeting specific disease associated pathways.

EndoBiobank®

Endodiag has built a regulatory compliant biobank of more than 1000 human biological samples, including fixed biopsies, serum, plasma and peritoneal fluid samples, as well as endometriosis primary cell cultures and endometriosis derived cell lines. These samples are annotated with patients’ clinical data.

EndoBiobank® together with the company’s established clinical network of international experts is an ideal tool for the assessment of new targets of interest in endometriosis and the evaluation of potential efficacy of new drug candidates. For this latter purpose Endodiag has developed a growing range of cell-based assays such as apoptosis, proliferation or migration assays.

For more information, please contact us.