Sign up for our Oncology Central weekly news round-up

Ten-gene biomarker panel: a new hope for ovarian cancer?


Survival rates for advanced stage ovarian cancer have not changed significantly over the past 40 years and ovarian cancer remains the most lethal gynecologic cancer in women. The most common type of ovarian cancer, and the one that accounts for the majority of deaths from ovarian cancer, is serous papillary carcinoma. Approximately 20% of patients with this ovarian cancer subtype are intrinsically resistant to chemotherapy or develop chemoresistant disease within 1 year from initial treatment. Currently, ovarian cancer surveillance and subsequent therapies are implemented on a ‘watch-and-wait’ basis because there is no diagnostic tool that identifies patients who have a high likelihood of recurrence. A reliable method to identify these poor prognosis patients would facilitate their inclusion into clinical trials or personalized treatment strategies at an earlier point. One successful example of such an approach is the development and validation of the Oncotype DX® (Genomic Health, Inc., CA, USA) and MammaPrint® (Agendia, Inc., CA, USA) assays for breast cancer [1, 2], which have become the standard of care for individualized treatment decision-making in breast cancer. Unlike in breast cancer, a fully-validated and clinically applied test that guides treatment decisions in the management of ovarian cancer patients does not exist.

Click here to view full article.