TGFBI as a candidate biomarker for non-invasive diagnosis of early-stage endometriosis

Can cartilage oligomeric matrix protein (COMP) and transforming growth factor-β-induced protein ig-h3 (TGFBI) alone or in combination with cancer antigen 125 (CA-125) be considered as potential blood biomarkers of endometriosis?

The results of this study indicate that COMP has no diagnostic value. TGFBI has potential as a non-invasive biomarker of the early stages of endometriosis, while TGFBI together with CA-125 has similar diagnostic characteristics as CA-125 alone for all stages of endometriosis.

Endometriosis is a common, chronic gynecological disease that significantly affects patient quality of life by causing pain and infertility. The gold standard for diagnosis is visual inspection of pelvic organs by laparoscopy, therefore there is an urgent need for discovery of non-invasive biomarkers for endometriosis to reduce diagnostic delays and allow earlier treatment of patients. The potential biomarkers for endometriosis evaluated in this study (COMP and TGFBI) were previously identified by our proteomic analysis of peritoneal fluid samples.

This is a case-control study divided into a discovery (n = 56 patients) and a validation phase (n = 237 patients). All patients were treated between 2008 and 2019 in a tertiary medical center.

Patients were stratified based on the laparoscopic findings. The discovery phase included 32 endometriosis patients (cases) and 24 patients with confirmed absence of endometriosis (controls). The validation phase included 166 endometriosis and 71 control patients. Concentrations of COMP and TGFBI were measured by ELISA in plasma samples, whereas concentration of CA-125 was measured using a clinically validated assay for serum samples. Statistical and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses were performed. The classification models were built using the linear support vector machine (SVM) method with the SVM built-in feature ranking method.

The discovery phase revealed significantly increased concentration of TGFBI, but not COMP, in plasma samples of patients with endometriosis compared to controls. In this smaller cohort, univariate ROC analysis showed fair diagnostic potential of TGFBI, with an AUC value of 0.77, sensitivity of 58%, and specificity of 84%. The classification model built using linear SVM and combining TGFBI and CA-125 showed an AUC value of 0.91, sensitivity of 88% and specificity of 75% in distinguishing patients with endometriosis from controls. The validation phase results revealed similar diagnostic characteristics of the SVM model combining TGFBI and CA-125, with an AUC value of 0.83, sensitivity of 83% and specificity of 67% and CA-125 alone with AUC value of 0.83, sensitivity of 73% and specificity of 80%. TGFBI exhibited good diagnostic potential for early-stage endometriosis (revised American Society for Reproductive Medicine stage I-II), with an AUC value of 0.74, sensitivity of 61% and specificity of 83% compared to CA-125, which had an AUC value of 0.63, sensitivity of 60% and specificity of 67%. An SVM model combining TGFBI and CA-125 showed a high AUC value of 0.94 and sensitivity of 95% for diagnosing moderate-to-severe endometriosis.

The diagnostic models were built and validated from a single endometriosis center, and thus further validation and technical verification in a multicenter study with a larger cohort is needed. Additional limitation was lack of histological confirmation of disease for some patients in the validation phase.

This study revealed for the first time increased concentration of TGFBI in plasma samples of patients with endometriosis, particularly those with minimal-to-mild endometriosis, compared to controls. This is the first step in considering TGFBI as a potential non-invasive biomarker for the early stages of endometriosis. It also opens a path for new basic research to investigate the importance of TGFBI in the pathophysiology of endometriosis. Further studies are needed to confirm the diagnostic potential of a model based on TGFBI and CA-125 for the non-invasive diagnosis of endometriosis.

The preparation of this manuscript was supported by grant J3-1755 from the Slovenian Research Agency to T.L.R and EU H2020-MSCA-RISE project TRENDO (grant 101008193). All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

NCT0459154.