Over the years Linda Griffith has undergone many surgeries for endometriosis, a condition in which tissue that normally grows in the uterus is found elsewhere in the body and can cause lesions, inflammation, and infertility. The disease is poorly understood, and so it made sense to Griffith, a professor of biological and mechanical engineering, to start researching it. In a paper published earlier this month, Griffith and colleagues, including bioengineering professor Douglas Lauffenburger, studied pelvic fluid from women with endometriosis and in about a third they found elevated levels of a group of immune system proteins. The work is an early step towards classifying the disease and, eventually, finding new treatments for it. “We’re not claiming we found a mechanism — the mechanism for endometriosis,” Griffith told the Boston Globe. “We have found a very convincing approach to understand an immune network.”

Explore Professor Griffith’s research in the Open Access Articles collection in DSpace@MIT, where it is openly accessible to the world.

Since the MIT faculty established their Open Access Policy in March 2009 they have made thousands of research papers freely available to the world via DSpace@MIT. To highlight that research, we’re offering a series of blog posts that link news stories about scholars’ work to their open access papers in DSpace.