Biomarkers for Ovarian Cancer Diagnostics Prognostics as a Guide to Individualized Therapies

High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HG-SOC) is the most lethal gynecologic malignancy, in large part because most patients present with late-stage disease and receive the same therapeutic regimen despite significant heterogeneity in disease and clinical response. A team of Stanford researchers have recently applied the mass cytometry technology platform for the first time to characterize protein expression levels in single cells of freshly resected HG-SOC tumors at a level of detail not previously seen. The researchers have discovered a tumor cell subset which co-expresses two biomarkers that can reliably predict whether newly diagnosed HG-SOC patients will undergo early relapse (within 1 year). Information regarding the likelihood of a patient proceeding to early relapse has profound implications for their clinical management.

Stage of Research
The inventors have performed an in depth analysis by mass cytometry, a state of the art technology platform to distinguish tumors with poor prognosis. They found that patients with tumors harboring greater than 1% of cells with the biomarker signature were 13 times more likely to go into early relapse than patients whose tumors harbored less than 1% of these cells.