Evolving Treatments for Cholangiocarcinoma

The standard of care for ovarian cancer is aggressive cytoreductive surgery followed by chemotherapy with platinum and taxane. Despite initial favorable responses, 65 percent of these patients recur with chemoresistant cancer during the first three years and succumb to disease. Currently, there is no diagnostic tool that identifies patients who have a high likelihood of recurrence, and treatment options are very limited for these patients. To improve patient survival, it is necessary to develop a reliable test to identify patients with poor prognosis and provide them with targeted therapy at an earlier point in the disease. Recent research at Cedars-Sinai demonstrated that high expression of 10 genes (AEBP1, COL11A1, COL5A1, COL6A2, LOX, POSTN, SNAI2, THBS2, TIMP3, VCAN) correlates with poor overall survival in ovarian cancer.1,2 This study included a total of 710 high-grade, advanced-stage serous ovarian cancer samples, the largest sample size used to date for discovery and validation of a gene biomarker panel. The 10 biomarker genes discovered in this study are strongly associated with poor overall survival. We postulated that some of the genes we discovered are not only biomarkers of poor survival but also active contributors to poor survival. The majority of the 10 biomarker genes are not expressed in normal ovaries, but their expression is enriched in metastases and even further enriched in recurrent metastases. These genes are also biomarkers of metastatic progression and poor survival in other