Special Feature: Swing and Miss?!? Efforts in Front-line Ovarian Cancer Chemotherapy Development.

A closer look at the components of these positively sloped survival curves demonstrates that most of the benefit afforded women is in life gained in the presence of disease, rather than cure. Indeed, the cure rates from ovarian cancer have remained relatively flat over these 3 decades, adding no more than approximately 2 weeks per year in the overall gain of life expectancy. This is clearly due to the unmovable percentage of advanced stage cases still indicative of the most common clinical presentation (stage III/IV), and underscores the immense impact even a slight stage migration could have on the overall clinical performance of women with this disease.