Cytokine Evaluations are Important

As we have spoken about on previous blogs and on our forum, endometrial biopsies, to evaluate the contribution of uterine natural killer cells, is still not completely reliable and is not consistently reproducible from cycle to cycle, according to a new study from this month's issue of the Journal of Reproductive Immunology. Knowing which location to count the cells in the sample, and getting the same results from every biopsy seem to be the most significant issues. At this point, I still believe that getting a cytokine evaluation, which would test the function of the cells that are found, is going to be more reliable until we are able to perform functional assays on the cells from the biopsy. There is nice work being done on this in France by Dr. Ledee's lab and we are also working on setting up these cytokine assays ourselves. We will keep you posted.