Yale School of Medicine

Discovery to Cure

One in fifty–seven women in the United States will develop ovarian cancer in her lifetime, the fifth most common cancer in women. In 2008, it is estimated that more than 21,000 new cases of ovarian cancer will be diagnosed and more than 15,000 women will die of the disease. The Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at Yale University has created a comprehensive women’s reproductive cancer treatment and early detection program known as Discovery to Cure.

Launched in 2003, the Discovery to Cure initiative focuses on exploring new methods for the prevention, early detection, and treatment of ovarian cancer. This past year has brought significant advances in the treatment of ovarian cancer with the advancement to Phase III clinical trials of the anti–cancer drug, phenoxodiol.

In addition to identifying novel treatments for ovarian cancer, The Discovery to Cure program is focused on developing disease markers that can predict the response to chemotherapy and therefore help determine the best method of treatment for women diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Using the extensive research resources of Discovery to Cure’s Tissue and Blood Bank, which contains over 500 tissue samples of primary and metastatic ovarian cancers as well as blood samples, we are also working to develop the screening tools that will enable physicians to detect ovarian cancer at its earliest stage.

After having developed a test for the detection of ovarian cancer with a specificity of 99.3% and sensitivity of 95.8% in a subset of samples from our Tissue and Blood Bank, the validation of the test is now proceeding on samples derived from other patient populations.

Please check this site periodically for updates on our progress with further validation studies of this test.

Publications describing the screening tests:

Gil Mor, Irene Visintin, Yinglei Lai, Hongyu Zhao, Peter Schwartz, Thomas Rutherford, Luo Yue, Patricia Bray-Ward, and David C. Ward. Serum protein markers for early detection of ovarian cancer, PNAS 2005:102 (2), 7677–7682.

Visintin, I., Alvero, A., Lai, Y., Tenthorey, J., Leiser, A., Flores, R., Rutherford, T., Schwartz, P., Ward, D., Mor, G.Diagnostic Markers For Early Detection Of Ovarian Cancer. Clinical Cancer Research 2008:14 (4), 1065-1072.

For those interested in reviewing or analyzing the raw data that are the subject of the above–cited paper in Clinical Cancer Research, click to download an Excel spreadsheet containing the assay results.