According to a story from SWNS, a grandmother who had survived a battle with ovarian cancer came face to face with the doctor responsible for developing the treatment that saved her. Sandy Tansley, a 73 year old from Bedfordshire, England, had used multiple cycles of chemotherapy and surgery in order to fight her ovarian cancer, which had reached stage three.
Ovarian cancer forms in or on the ovary. The cancer can easily spread from here to the liver, lungs, abdominal lining, and lymph nodes. Often ovarian cancer has only vague symptoms at first, which makes it difficult to detect in the early stages when it is most easy to get rid of. The risk is greater in women who have ovulated the most over the course of their lives. Women who begin ovulating early or who experience menopause later than normal are at greater risk. In about ten percent of cases, a genetic mutation is responsible for an increased risk. As the cancer progresses, symptoms include loss of appetite, pelvic pain, abdominal swelling, irregular menstruation or other vaginal bleeding, fatigue, and indigestion. In the US, the five year survival rate is 45%. Treatment normally involves surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. To learn more about this type of cancer, click here.
Despite the attempts at treatment, things only seemed to be getting worse for Tansley. Soon, doctors discovered that the ovarian cancer had spread to her stomach, and she had four separate tumors there.
She was told that her last option was to enroll in a clinical trial for a targeted therapy called olaparib.
The treatment worked. After two years of taking the new drug, the tumors in Tansley’s stomach had disappeared. After her success, the nonprofit organization Worldwide Cancer Research arranged for Sandy to meet the Professor Steve Jackson, the man who was responsible for the development of olaparib. The new treatment was the result of nearly twenty years of research led by Jackson. Worldwide Cancer Research helped the fund the project.
