Women with recurrent ovarian cancer can be helped by an experimental therapy using a drug already touted for its ability to fight other cancers, a finding that provides hope for improved treatment of this deadly disease.

Oncologist Allison Kurian, MD, and her colleagues at the Stanford University School of Medicine were perplexed. Computer models designed to identify women who might have dangerous genetic mutations that increase their risk of breast and ovarian cancer worked well for white women. But they seemed to be less reliable for another ethnic group.

Dr Stephen Taylor and Karen Gascoigne at the University’s Faculty of Life Sciences have taken a new systematic approach to studying anti-mitotic drugs, which are used extensively for breast or ovarian cancer in the UK.

Scientists from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center have found overexpression of tissue type transglutaminase (TG2) in ovarian cancer is associated with increased tumor cell growth and adhesion, resistance to chemotherapy and lower overall survival rates.

Researchers have shown for the first time that it is possible to stimulate a woman's ovaries to produce eggs for collection during the final phase of the menstrual cycle.

Ground-breaking research in the June issue of Integrative Cancer Therapies published by SAGE explored whether ovarian cancer has a scent different from other cancers and whether working dogs could be taught to distinguish it in its different stages.

Women's reports of persistent, recent-onset symptoms linked to ovarian cancer – abdominal or pelvic pain, difficulty eating or feeling full quickly and abdominal bloating – when combined with the CA125 blood test may improve the early detection of ovarian cancer by 20 percent, according to new findings by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center published online today in CANCER.

Combined positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scanning of patients in the early stages of ovarian cancer can enable physicians to determine whether the cancer has spread to nearby lymph nodes without having to perform surgery, according to researchers at the SNM's 55th Annual Meeting. As a result, unnecessary surgeries could be reduced, which would also lower morbidity rates and postoperative complications for ovarian cancer patients.

Ovarian function can be preserved and disease activity controlled in women with severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) when treated with a 6-month course of cyclophosphamide (CYC), a chemotherapy drug, followed by the immunosuppressant mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), according to a new study presented today at EULAR 2008, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Paris, France.

In a leading study that has implications for the development of novel therapies for a number of breast, lung and ovarian cancers that have lost the expression of a gene called glypican-3 (GPC3), Sunnybrook researchers have discovered how the loss of the GPC3 gene induces overgrowth through certain growth factors such as Sonic Hedgehog which stimulate cancer growth.

Researchers at Yale School of Medicine have identified, characterized and cloned ovarian cancer stem cells and have shown that these stem cells may be the source of ovarian cancer’s recurrence and its resistance to chemotherapy.

In a discovery that may be useful for maintaining remission in chemo-resistant ovarian cancer, Yale scientists report that pre-clinical studies have shown the drug compound NV-128 can induce the death of ovarian cancer cells by halting the activation of a protein pathway called mTOR.