Endometriosis is a chronic, debilitating and painful disease that affects more than 10 percent of women between the ages of 14 and 45 and can make it challenging to get pregnant.
This disease occurs when tissue that is supposed to line the uterus is found throughout the pelvis or in other areas. Often pidgeonholed as a reproductive disease, it can affect the whole body with endometrial tissue growing in locations such as the brain or legs.
If this is your story, you may be accustomed to experiencing excruciating pain as a result of the misplaced tissue.
For those with endometriosis, pain often worsens during menstrual periods because endometrial tissue outside the uterus can grow and bleed in sync with a menstrual period. This causes pain because the swelling and blood can’t easily exit the body as menstrual blood can.
Anyone with a uterus can develop endometriosis, but women in their 30s and 40s are particularly impacted. Women who have never had children and those with a family member who has endometriosis are more likely to develop this health problem.
Scientists don’t know what triggers endometriosis. Some possible causes include blockages that prevent menstrual blood from leaving the body, genetics, problems with the immune system that prevent it from inhibiting the growth of endometrial tissue in places where it doesn’t belong, and hormonal imbalances.
Temple Therapeutics is seeking to change the ways in which endometriosis is both detected and treated so women like you feel listened to and empowered. We want to stop the suffering so you can get back to doing what you love, free of pain.
The current procedure for diagnosis involves laparoscopic surgery using a tiny camera inserted through a small incision, which can be inaccurate and lead to complications including adhesions. Temple is pioneering an entirely new diagnostic method: the first non-invasive alternative to surgical diagnosis.
This approach will allow for safer, easier, and more accurate confirmation of disease, reducing the financial, physical, and emotional burden on patients and their communities. We are also seeking to improve the available therapies by developing a drug to treat endometriosis. Together, these represent a pipeline of synergistic, highly differentiated diagnostic and drug candidates that leverage novel cellular metabolism insights.
To bolster this critical endometriosis work, we are creating a global platform for dialogue among endometriosis patients, their communities, healthcare providers, and scientific experts, building an evidence-based culture of education and support for those suffering from this disease.
Our researchers are developing a panel of biomarkers, TTX334Dx, that has shown an ability in early trials to detect endometriosis with a high level of sensitivity and specificity. These biomarkers, or molecules in the blood, represent a non-invasive, non-hormonal, blood-based biomarker panel that allows earlier detection, identifying disease before it progresses to a more complex stage.
This approach decreases the risk of misdiagnosis and its accompanying complications, while also helping manage the disease by assessing the efficacy of other potential therapies. The validation of the biomarkers in TTX334Dx led to the development of our non-hormonal therapy, TTX334e.
TTX334e is intended to treat endometriosis. The drug is currently in preclinical stages. Unlike existing treatments, which include painkillers, surgeries, and hormonal drugs, TTX334e acts by killing fibrotic cells, attacking the root cause of the disease rather than attempting to just mitigate symptoms.
•Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics, May 2011
•Journal of the Society for Gynecologic Investigation, July 2006
