Bruce Lessey, MD, PhD

Dr. Bruce A. Lessey is a physician-scientist with a long-standing interest in basic and translational research on endometrial function. He received his PhD at Colorado State University with a focus on steroid receptor biology, expanding into human research under the direction of Kathryn Horowitz at University of CO School of Medicine (1981-84) on breast cancer and the endometrium at Duke University 1984-8 with Dr. Kenneth McCarty Jr.  He published one of the first studies on immune-localization of steroid receptors through the menstrual cycle in 1988. Dr. Lessey completed his fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of Pennsylvania, where he published the first in series of comprehensive studies on integrins in the endometrium and established the beta 3 integrin as a biomarker of endometrial receptivity and a diagnostic test for endometriosis. He became a Professor in the Department of OBGYN at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC-Chapel Hill) where he remained until moving to Greenville SC to become Division Director at the Greenville Health System in 2003.  The current focus of his laboratory continues to focus on endometrial receptivity and the role of endometriosis in unexplained infertility and pregnancy loss. He is collaborating with colleagues at the USC SOM in Columbia and UNC-Chapel Hill and Michigan State University, investigating the mechanisms by which inflammation contributes to progesterone resistance and subfertility.