Dateline DFCI
Multicenter project seeks to lower ovarian cancer deaths
Although treatable if caught early, ovarian cancer often eludes detection because its symptoms are vague—or even silent. Dana-Farber and several collaborating institutions, however, are loud and clear in their efforts to combat the disease.
Photo of Ovarian Cancer Cells
With an $11 million, four-and-a-half-year grant from the National Cancer Institute, researchers with the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center (DF/HCC) are pursuing a broad program aimed at lowering deaths from ovarian cancer, which is expected to claim about 16,000 American lives this year. The highly sought-after grant is known as a Specialized Project of Research Excellence, or SPORE, and it is one of seven currently held by the DF/HCC around different diseases.
"Our mission is to investigate ways to prevent, detect, and treat ovarian cancer, the leading cause of death in this country from gynecologic cancer," says principal investigator Daniel Cramer, MD. A leader in the field, Cramer is co-director of the Familial Ovarian Cancer Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dana-Farber. Other Institute investigators involved with the SPORE include Alan D'Andrea, MD, and Donald Kufe, MD.
The effort will focus on five projects that aim to, among other goals: identify genetic and environmental risk factors for ovarian cancer, probe changes in early-stage epithelial ovarian tumors (which originate in cells lining the surface of the ovaries), and develop therapeutic vaccines for this disease.
Dana-Farber's Judy Garber, MD, MPH, is co-leading a project with Steven Skates, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital to identify new biomarkers of early ovarian cancer among high-risk women undergoing removal of fallopian tubes and ovaries. "We are excited about this project," she says. "Better early markers would help high-risk women avoid the preventive removal of healthy ovarian tissue, as well as help women at normal risk minimize the chance of a missed diagnosis."
