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Ovarian cancer is one of the most common cancers for women in Europe; around 68 000 new cases were diagnosed in 2020 alone. A key challenge in treating this disease is the fact that most of these diagnoses – up to 70 % – are made when the disease is already in an advanced stage.
This has significant implications for ensuring successful treatment.
“If diagnosed late, the 5-year survival rate for women with ovarian cancer is less than 30 %,” notes EARLYDETECT project coordinator, Paula Mendes, from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.
“However, over 90 % of patients will survive if the disease is detected early – even if they have the most malignant and serious forms of the cancer.”
Enabling early cancer detection
Early detection of the disease before it spreads is therefore absolutely critical. Current screening tools, however, have been unable to achieve this on a consistent basis.
“Serum CA125 is the most frequently used tumour marker for diagnosis,” explains Mendes. “But this has limited sensitivity and specificity. It is capable of detecting only around 50 % of stage 1 disease.”
For this reason, Mendes and her team sought new ways of quickly and accurately detecting this disease. To achieve this, they opted to take a different approach.
“We knew that ovarian cancer is associated with alterations in the sugars of secreted glycoproteins,” she adds. “As such, we thought that these could serve as early ovarian cancer biomarkers.”
Glycoproteins are molecules made up of proteins and carbohydrates, and are involved in many bodily functions, including immunity.
However, this knowledge had still not been translated into clinical settings. The good news is that under a previous EU-funded project called GLYCOSURF, Mendes and her team had been able to develop a way of sharply discriminating between different overall sugar structures.
This achievement was built upon in EARLYDETECT, to develop a new process for accurately measuring and identifying sugars associated with ovarian cancer.
Dramatically improving standard of care
Following the successful completion of EARLYDETECT, Mendes and her team are working on clinically validating the effectiveness of the technology in detecting ovarian cancer, with the support of the charity Cancer Research UK.
“We believe that this has the potential to radically change the diagnostic standard of care for ovarian cancer, because it can accurately detect the disease at an early stage,” she says.
“This promises to bring huge health and financial benefits. Detecting ovarian cancer before it spreads will dramatically improve cancer outcomes, because treatments are far more effective at earlier stages. More lives can be saved.”
In addition to long-term survival benefits, earlier diagnoses also open up a greater range of treatment options, many of which have less of an impact on a woman’s quality of life. And successfully treating the disease early means less burden on healthcare systems.
“The costs of treating a woman with early-stage ovarian cancer are significantly lower than the costs of treating a woman with advanced disease,” says Mendes. “In addition, our assay will be affordable and able to be used by primary caregivers. This will reduce the burden of specialist referrals and costly diagnostic procedures.”