Courtesy of discoveries from a national research study co-led out of the University of Alberta, and it may soon be possible for oncologists to have an accurate and inexpensive way of distinguishing between forms of ovarian cancer that will enhance how patients are treated.
U of A oncology researcher and co-director of the Cancer Research Institute of Northern Alberta, Lynne Postovit said that one of the issues with ovarian cancer is that they cannot fully decipher between subtypes. This issue is an essential problem because different subtypes should be treated differently.
In her explanation, Postovit claimed that women with endometrioid-type ovarian carcinoma have an improved prognosis for beating the disease and need a less aggressive treatment than women suffering from high-grade serous carcinomas which is the most deadly and widespread form of ovarian cancer.
Sadly, the diagnosis of which form of ovarian cancer a woman has is wrong 10 percent of the time.
Postovit said that it doesn't sound like a big deal, but the difference in the ways that women with endometrioid versus high-grade serous are treated is significant. Postovit received funding from the Lois Hole Hospital for women through the Women and Children's Health Research Institute.
For oncologists, not knowing with complete certainty which forms of cancer the patient has means that they have to go with the harshest treatment regardless.
The researchers grew tired of the warning and most overtly aggressive one-size-fits-all treatment, Postovit, along with colleagues at the University of Calgary and Western University, investigated the proteins present in the different types of cancers.
The researchers discovered eight protein biomarkers that enable pathologists to differentiate between an endometrioid or high-grade serous carcinoma with 99.2 percent accuracy.
She explained further that the relevance is if you know what you're looking at, you take a precision medicine approach to better tailor the treatment to the patient, so they have potentially fewer side-effects. This instance informed what personalized medicine is all about, starting to look at each patient's cancer differently.
And since the study was tailored to be more practical, Postovit said that the team could immediately start to test how broadly this might work. Postovit noted that because it is a rather inexpensive test and involves technology already established, there is no need to build a new paradigm. It can be taken up without costing all that much.
According to Postovit, the next steps are to validate the results on a larger patient cohort and then to suggest implementation which could be within a few years. She concluded that this is all because of generous and chair funding that allows them to ask questions that they usually wouldn't.
