Purpose: Chemokines play essential role not only in controlling leukocyte function and trafficking but also in the angiogenesis and modulation of inflammatory responses.
Material and methods: A novel array-based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to quantitate peritoneal fluid chemokines of 25 infertile women with endometriosis and 18 controls. For our preliminary studies we chose mini-array containing nine different chemokines: MDC/CCL22, TARC/CCL17, MCP-1/CCL2, RANTES/CCL5, MIP-1alpha/CCL3, -1beta/CCL4, -1delta/CCL15, -3alpha/CCL20, and -3beta/CCL19.
Results: We found significantly higher MIP-3beta/CCL19 (P = 0.0036) concentrations in peritoneal fluid of women with endometriosis as compared to patients with primary infertility without any signs of disease.
Conclusions: Our preliminary results suggest that MIP-3beta/ /CCL19 might play a role in the pathogenesis of endometriosis but its precise role remains to be established. Novel types of screening methods based on high-throughput technologies offer great opportunities to study immunobiology of endometriosis. It will hopefully provide new possibilities for discovery of new markers and potential drug targets.