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An Update on Ovarian Cancer
Not one but many diseases
Dr. David Huntsman and his fellow researchers believe that ovarian cancer is not a single disease with many different manifestations, but many completely different diseases that happen to appear in the same part of the body. “We are much more likely to find new treatments for these specific subtypes of ovarian cancer, than we are to find treatments that are effective across a spectrum of very different diseases,” David says.
“Through the study of the subtypes of ovarian cancer and the development of subtype-specific prevention and screening, we can reduce the number of deaths from ovarian cancer. Much of this research is performed on specimens from women at a high risk for developing ovarian cancer, due to their family history. But because 80 per cent don’t have a family history, the endgame has to be to find biomarkers for those women not in this high-risk group.” “We’re also working to develop biomarkers, which indicate the progress of the disease or the tumour’s reaction to treatment, to aid our decision-making in patient treatment.”
A vision of improved outcomes
“We envision a large number of approaches to reaching our goal to improve patient outcomes. I expect that within 10 years, and I hope much before then, when a patient comes to the clinic, the treatment team won’t say, ‘you have ovarian cancer, this is the treatment’, but instead will say ‘you have this type of ovarian cancer and based on studies of your tumour, we believe it will respond best to these particular therapies.’ In other words, there will be choices and tools to enable the treatment team to pick the best options for each patient. We know the bar is high, but we can see it.”
BC Cancer Foundation donors are part of the team
BC Cancer Foundation donors helped fund the OvCaRe (ovarian cancer research) platform, which includes the BC Cancer Agency’s Cheryl Brown Ovarian Cancer Outcomes unit, the ovarian cancer tissue bank at Vancouver General Hospital and the tissue array lab. These combined resources allow David’s team to compare thousands of outcomes of former patients and compare how tumours responded to different treatments.
Progress to date
David is proud of the team’s progress. “The international community now looks to us to understand the clinical relevance of genetic and genomic discoveries in ovarian cancer, both in terms of potential biomarker development and new therapeutic strategies. We have developed the first subtype-specific biomarkers and we are now working with the Agency’s clinical trials group to develop the next generation of clinical trials.”
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