09/23/2026
FROM THE OPERATING ROOM TO THE LAB
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to spend the morning at the Seckin Endometriosis Research Center for Women’s Health at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) in New York.
I spend most of the days thinking about endometriosis from the operating room.
What disease can I see? Where is it hiding? How do I safely remove it? And how do we help this patient feel better and get back to her life?
But after caring for so many women with endo, I’m also left with questions that surgery alone cannot answer.
- Why can two patients with seemingly similar disease experience completely different symptoms?
- Why do lesions behave differently?
- Why do patients experience recurrence while others do not?
- What roles might inflammation, immunity, fibrosis, genetics, metabolism, or the microbiome play?
- And ultimately, are we even dealing with one biologically uniform disease when we say “endometriosis”?
At Cold Spring Harbor, we stepped into the lab to see how researchers are investigator questions like these, including through patient-derived organic models that offer another way to study aspects of endo biology.
We talked about what I see in surgery. What researchers are seeing in the laboratory. What Savannah, MS, MBA, CNS | Women’s Health & Endometriosis sees through nutrition and her own experience with endometriosis. What Kara O'Malley hears through advocacy. And, as he so often does through Endometrosis Education, Jeff listened and kept asking questions from the perspective of the people we are ultimately trying to serve.
We also talked about observations that may be worth studying more closely, including questions we are beginning to ask around GLP-1s, metabolism, and inflammation.
That distinction matters:
Observations aren’t answers. They’re questions worth studying.
I left Cold Spring Harbor thinking about just how much we still have to learn about this disease. And how much more we may learn when patients, surgeons, scientists, advocates, and listeners are part of the same conversation.
I wrote about my visit, comment COLD SPRING and I’ll send the article.
