Ovarian cancer owes its often-dismal prognosis to the late stage at which it’s typically discovered. If a tumor is found when it’s small and cancer cells haven’t spread, treatment works well for 90% of patients. But most women are diagnosed at stage 3 or later in their disease, when only 30% reach the five-year survival benchmark.
New research published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine offers some reason for hope: Proof of principle for detecting ovarian cancer as much as nine years before a diagnosis, based on cells taken from routine Pap tests used to screen for cervical cancer. But because the study was small and retrospective, its authors and experts not involved in the research say its results need to be taken with a large dose of caution.
“I think it’s an interesting idea,” Tyler Hillman, a gynecologic oncologist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston who also runs a research lab focused on cancer genomics, told STAT. “And after reading this paper, I think it remains an interesting idea. It’s tough because you really want studies like this to be the breakthrough, but it’s not for lack of trying and not for lack of resources that we haven’t solved this problem yet, unfortunately.”