Jan 2012: Faulty proteins may prove significant in identifying new treatments for ovarian cancer | e! Science News

Link:  PLOS One published study


 Objective
To define the BRCAness profile of sporadic ovarian carcinoma and determine whether BRCA1, PARP, FANCD2, PTEN, H2AX, ATM, and P53 protein expression correlates with response to treatment, disease recurrence, and recurrence-free survival.

"The study -- which was supported by the Sherie Hildreth Ovarian Cancer (SHOC) Foundation -- focused on proteins that are supposed to assist cells in repairing harmful breaks in DNA strands, a process called homologous recombination (HR). The malfunctioning of HR is not well understood in ovarian cancers where there is no family history of the disease. However, there is evidence that these proteins influence a patient's ability to respond to drugs and their survival rates after treatment."

full access: PLoS ONE: The Prognostic Value of BRCA1 mRNA Expression Levels Following Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Breast Cancer

Background:
A fraction of sporadic breast cancers has low BRCA1 expression. BRCA1 mutation carriers are more likely to achieve a pathological complete response with DNA-damage-based chemotherapy compared to non-mutation carriers. Furthermore, sporadic ovarian cancer patients with low levels of BRCA1 mRNA have longer survival following platinum-based chemotherapy than patients with high levels of BRCA1 mRNA.
Conclusions/Significance:
We provide evidence for a major role for BRCA1 mRNA expression as a marker of time to progression and overall survival in sporadic breast cancers treated with anthracycline-based chemotherapy. These findings can be useful for customizing chemotherapy.

Association of pegylated liposomal doxorubicin and ifosfamide in early recurrent ovarian cancer patients: A Multicenter Phase II Trial

Conclusion

The combination of PLD and continuous IFO is a feasible and efficient treatment in patients with relapsed ovarian cancer, especially with TFI between 6 and 12 months. This regimen may represent an alternative to platinum reintroduction and should be evaluated in a randomized trial.

Jan 23, 2009: Authors' Reply: Dose-dense paclitaxel for advanced ovarian cancer – Authors' reply : The Lancet

Authors' explanation to Commentaries 1 & 2

Jan 23, 2009: Commentary (2nd of 2): Dose-dense paclitaxel for advanced ovarian cancer : The Lancet

Prognostic and predictive factors in epithelial ovarian cancer (Bull)

[Prognostic and predictive factors in epithelial ovarian cancer.]

[Article in French]

Boudou-Rouquette P, Pautier P, Morice P, Lhommé C.

Comité de gynécologie, Institut Gustave-Roussy, 39, rue Camille-Desmoulins, 94800 Villejuif, France.

Even if prognosis of epithelial ovarian cancer remains very bad, survival and response to treatment are variable according to the patients. Determination of new prognostic markers helps us to adapt therapeutics for each patient and is necessary for the elaboration and the interpretation of clinical research studies. Many prognostic factors related to the tumor, the patient or the treatment, have been evaluated. The goal of this work is to review these parameters. So far, the most powerful variables are volume of residual disease after cytoreductive surgery, FIGO tumor stage, histologic type and grade of differentiation. The progress and accessibility to novel technologies applied to biology will make possible in the future the assessment of new prognostic profiles-based on genetic and/or proteomic tumor characteristics. The future also relies on the identification of predictive factors of response to treatment, but force is to note that on the last hundred publications testing predictive factors (p53, HER2, Topo-2-alpha, BRCA...), none have modified today our clinical practices.