Research Abstract

One of the primary challenges in the management of advanced ovarian cancer is the inability to identify which patients have been cured from front-line treatment. Many patients have already been cured of their disease, but still receive unnecessary maintenance treatment. Many others do not benefit from a given maintenance strategy and receive ineffective treatment which only delivers toxicity. Clinicians do not yet have a tool to guide decision making with more precision. I am working with a group of researchers to develop an ovarian cancer liquid biopsy, which could be applied to this clinical context. A cost-efficient and highly sensitive assay also has the potential to identify mutations predictive of treatment response or resistance, and future research using expanded gene panels could address this possibility.