According to a story from healthnewsdigest.com, teams of researchers from around the world have successfully revealed a new biomarker that can help predict treatment outcomes in ovarian cancer. The activity of this biomarker may help explain why around 15 percent of ovarian cancer patients are cured after a single round of treatment whereas the remainder almost always experience relapse.
About Ovarian Cancer
Ovarian cancer can appear on or within the ovary. Ovarian cancer rarely causes distinctive symptoms in its early stages, so many patients are often diagnosed with advanced disease. The risk of getting ovarian cancer is connected to how long a woman has ovulated during her life; women who ovulate for longer periods are at greater risk. Late menopause or early puberty are risk factors, as are not having children, fertility medication, certain genetic variants and mutations (such as BRCA mutations), and exposure to talc, herbicides, and pesticides. Some symptoms of ovarian cancer include fatigue, bloating, a feeling of fullness, loss of appetite, indigestion, abdominal swelling, and pelvic pain. Treatment can include chemo, radiation, surgery, hormone therapy, and immunotherapy. There are many different kinds of ovarian cancer. Five year survival rate is 45 percent in the US. To learn more about ovarian cancer, click here.
CT45
The biomarker has been named CT45. A high concentration of this biomarker was found to be associated with a greater likelihood of long term, cancer free survival for women who had advanced ovarian cancer. In fact, the scientists found that women with high levels of CT45 in their ovarian cancer tumors were able to survive for seven times as long in comparison to patients that had a lower level of CT45 in their tumor. The discovery of CT45 was the result of an extensive search and analysis of nearly 9,000 different proteins.
The discovery of CT45 is also useful because it is relevant to the most common type of ovarian cancer, serous carcinoma. The majority of patients with the disease have this type. Since its presence is able to determine the outcome of treatment, it is likely that CT45 plays a major role in determining how a tumor responds to chemotherapy treatment.
The original study was published in the biomedical, peer-reviewed journal Cell.
