Professor Aaron SulkesHead of the Oncology Center
Genetics in Ovarian Cancer Treatment
Researchers from the Yale Cancer Center (www.sciencedaily.com) have proven that even slight changes in genes significantly affect survival chances and treatment response quality in women with ovarian cancer.
The results published in the journal Oncogene provide a new perspective on the biology of a new class of cancer markers and initiate the use of 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 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 poorest prognoses for treatment outcomes. "To do this, only a small number of hereditary genetic changes need to be monitored."
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 oncogene variant, some drugs targeting the KRAS gene have already been developed and show great promise.
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 were able 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.