Predicting Ovarian Cancer Chemotherapy Response, Survival

MINNEAPOLIS - Researchers at the University of Minnesota medical school have identified gene biomarkers that can predict whether or not patients with advanced stages of ovarian cancer will respond to chemotherapy.

Epithelial ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological cancer in the United States, but because of the lack of overt symptoms at the early stages of the disease more than 60 percent of patients receive a diagnosis when their disease has already reached an advanced stage.

As a result, health care providers must quickly learn which patients will respond to standard chemotherapy and which will not, shaving valuable time off their treatment approach.

"This research will allow physicians to identify those patients who will not respond to the standard chemotherapy and to apply a different treatment from the outset, which could increase the survival of those patients," said Dr. Jason B. Nikas, the study's lead author. "Furthermore, this research could lead to the development of new, more efficacious pharmaceuticals that could considerably extend the survival of those patients, or perhaps even constitute a cure for this disease."

Researchers arrived at these results by examining ovarian tumor tissue from patients with advanced cancer prior to chemotherapy and determined gene expression profiles. After treatment, patients were stratified as treatment responders and long-term survivors (living greater than 7 years) or treatment non-responders and short-term survivors (living less than 3 years).

The researchers found that specific combinations of genes were capable of predicting treatment responders vs. non-responders with accuracies greater than 95 percent based on 54 ovarian cancer patients. In their report, the researchers also indicated that the biomarkers identified in their study represent altered gene networks that could serve as targets for the development of novel and more effective pharmacological treatments.

"The next step is to confirm these gene expression biomarkers with additional ovarian cancer patients in order to establish the clinical utility of these biomarkers," said Dr. Walter Low, co-investigator of the study. "We're obviously excited about this research and what it could mean for the advancement of treating this disease."

The results of the study are published in the journal Cancer Informatics. This research was funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health and from the National Cancer Institute.