Ricerc@Sapienza

Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological malignancy, frequently diagnosed at an advanced stage and with poor long-term survival rates. At first relapse, approximately 25% of patients have platinum-resistant/refractory ovarian cancer and almost all patients with recurrent disease ultimately develop platinum resistance. Development of platinum resistance is associated with worse PFS and OS.
Optimal management of recurrent platinum-resistant/refractory ovarian cancer remains an area of uncertainty. This subgroup of patients constitutes, indeed, a heterogeneous spectrum of disease with a low response rate to therapy (10%-25%), generally of short duration. For this reason, in this setting of patients, research is focusing on identifying new molecular targets with the final aims of better understanding the mechanisms leading OC to platinum-resistance and introducing targeted agents able to overcome resistance to platinum, thus impacting patients' survival.
Aim of the present study is to evaluate, in both platinum-resistant/refractory paired primary and recurrent OC tissue samples, the modulation of a panel of 14 intratumoral immune-related proteins expression, thus tracing an intratumoral immunological signature possibly able to predict patients' treatment response and survival outcome. The study will be carried out in collaboration with the international research group of "TOC Network" (www.toc-network.de), which currently holds the largest European collection of paired primary and recurrent ovarian cancer tissue samples. TOC samples are stored at the "Tumor Bank Ovarian Cancer Laboratory" (TOC-Lab), at the Department of Gynecology, Charité Medical University of Berlin, Germany (Head Prof. Jalid Sehouli, TOC Coordinator Prof. Elena Ioana Braicu).