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Project

Searching for new leads in the diagnosis of ovarian cancer (TRANS-IOTA)

Ovarian cancer is a silent killer, metastasizing troughout the abdomen before causing symptoms. A total of 80% of patients will die of the disease. Survival can be ameliorated by screening, improving diagnosis or improving treatment. research so far has invested in optimizing treatment resulting in an increase in overall survival from 18 to 44 months over the last 20 years. Screening has been proven no to be beneficial. optimizing the diagnosis has always been the lowes priority in literature, which is of course wrong because good treatment starts with a correct diagnosis. The IOTA (International Ovarian Tumor Analysis) terms, definitions and models, developed by an international consortium coordinated by Dirk Temmerman (UZ Leuven), have tremendously increased the diagnosis of ovarian pathology, discriminating benign from borderline and malignant ovarian cyst by the use of ultrasound variables. However, the models are not impeccable. A substanial number of masses are still hard to calssify.

In this research project, called TRANS-IOTA (translational IOTA) we want to search for new biomarkers in ovarian cancer patients that in the end then can serve as new diagnostic tool on itself or can be integrated in the IOTA models, improving their accuracy. As biomarkers, we will focus on three pillars: proteins (thusfar the only toroughly studied liquid biopsy in ovarian cancer), ctDNA (cellfree DNA resulting from apoptotic cells, a fastly emerging approach in the field of cancer, though for ovarian cancer only limited studies) and the ratios of immune cells (no studies as a possible liquid biopsy in ovarian cancer). The teams involved in this TRANS-IOTA research have substantial knowledge in these diverse fields, which makes this a unique approach of studying three types of biomarkers at the same time possible.

An amelioration of the diagnosis will lead to a more correct and earlier diagnosis. On the one hand, this will result (if the cyst turns out to be malignant) in a correct oncologic treatment from the beginning on and in the diagnosis at an earlier stage, leading to an increase in patient survival. On the other hand, it will result (if the cyst turns out to be benign) in a more conservative follow up and therefore reduced morbidity of unnecessary surgery.

Date:1 Oct 2017 →  30 Sep 2021
Keywords:diagnosis, ovarian cancer
Disciplines:Morphological sciences, Oncology