Researchers in the U.S. are looking at gene therapy to treat this type of cancer. One of the people involved is Dr Mark Pegram of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. Let s get some background though, because whilst ovarian cancer isn t the most common female malignancy by any means, it is one of the most intractable.
Ovarian cancer is one of the leading causes of death of the female gynaecologic malignancies.
It s a very important public health problem, there will be about 20,000 cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed in the United States this year. And three-fourths of those are discovered at a late stage, at the time of diagnosis, by which time it s very difficult to treat. The standard treatments are surgery followed by chemotherapy, but unfortunately the success rate of that standard approach, is very, very poor indeed. So that s really a poor result, especially when you consider that if a patient has a recurrence of ovarian cancer it s generally considered incurable. Because it often goes with breast cancer, at least genetically.