link: ABSTRACT and open text PDF
Background:
Ovarian cancer causes more deaths than any other gynecological cancer.
Identifying the molecular mechanisms that drive disease progress in ovarian cancer is a critical step in providing therapeutics, improving diagnostics, and affiliating clinical behavior with disease etiology. Identification of molecular interactions that stratify prognosis is key in
facilitating a clinical-molecular perspective.
Results:
The Cancer Genome Atlas has recently made available the molecular characteristics of more than 500 patients......
Blogger's Note: see also - The Cancer Genome Atlas completes detailed ovarian cancer analysis NCI Press Release (2011)
CONCLUSIONS
"..........Over the past few decades, different genes have been used, with greater or lesser success, as biomarkers for prognostics. In the work presented here, by performing genome-wide sequential
analyses across all genes and across all pathways, starting with TCGA and validating in two additional datasets, we saw how the single-gene approach fails to stratify patients robustly into prognostic groups.
"Our results demonstrate that pathway interactions are either associated with improved prognosis by "helping" the pathway counter the tumor, or with poor prognosis by "breaking down" the pathway's normal activity. Through better understanding of the pathway mechanisms and the interactions that undergo changes, we may find targets for new treatments. The fact that the pathway we identified did not correlate with age or tumor diameter and was found in all
three datasets strengthens the hypothesis that this pathway is a core mechanism of the disease."
