Expression data from human endometrium

The purpose of this study was to compare and contrast the expression of mRNA sequences in samples of endometrial glandular epithelium taken at discrete points in the menstrual cycle of healthy female subjects. This study was approved by the Erasme Hospital Ethics Committee and was conducted at the Pfizer Clinical Research Unit at the Erasme hospital, Brussels. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki on Ethical Principals for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects, adopted by the General Assembly of the World Medical Association (1996). In addition, the study was conducted in accordance with the protocol, the principles of the International Conference on Harmonization guideline on Good Clinical Practice and applicable local regulatory requirements and laws. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants in this study prior to screen. Female healthy subjects were between 20 and 39 years of age and had a regular menstrual cycle. A total of 23 endometrial biopsies were taken from women at different stages of their menstrual cycle (mid & late follicular; early & mid luteal phases) by pipelle catheter. Glandular epithelium was laser capture microdissected and total RNA was purified, labelled and hybridized to Affymetrix HG-U133 Plus 2 chips using standard protocols. The resulting data were subjected to a principal component analysis and assessment by a proprietary methodology, the causal reasoning engine. Using this analysis we describe new progesterone marker genes and a robust methodology which may be useful for identifying endometrial pharmacological response genes or diagnostic disease markers. A single sample was taken from each of 20 human subjects at time points across the menstrual cycle.