Professor Aaron SulkesHead of the Oncology Center
Genetics in Ovarian Cancer Treatment
Researchers from the Yale Cancer Center (www.sciencedaily.com) have proven that a slight change in genes significantly affects survival chances and the quality of response to ovarian cancer treatment in patients.
The results published in the journal Oncogene provide a new perspective on the biology of a new class of cancer markers and begin to utilize genetic tests to simplify the treatment of women with ovarian cancer.
Joanna Weidhaas, an associate professor in the Department of Therapeutic Radiology and the lead author of this study, believes that this will help identify a group of women at the highest risk of resistance to platinum chemotherapy, the standard treatment method for ovarian cancer, as well as identify patients with the worst prognosis for treatment outcomes. "For this, it is necessary to monitor only a small number of hereditary genetic changes."
Women who have the biomarker identified by the Yale team - a variant of the well-known oncogene KRAS - are three times more resistant to standard platinum chemotherapy than women without such a marker.
Although there are still no reliable alternatives to chemotherapy for women with ovarian cancer and this variant of the oncogene, some drugs targeting the KRAS gene have already been developed and appear to be quite promising.
This biomarker is of interest to scientists because it is a functional variant in the area of DNA that does not code for proteins. On the contrary, this variant disrupts the principles of gene expression control in microRNA.
In laboratory trials, researchers managed to block this variant and significantly reduce the growth of cancer cells in the ovaries. This suggests that someday this variant could be used for treating cancer in such patients.