OVARIAN CANCER GENOMIC AND METABOLIC INFORMATION support EARLY DIAGNOSIS, TUMOR DETECTION AND TREATMENT
T he age-adjusted death rate for cancer in the United States dropped by 32 percent between 1991 to 2019, according to the American Cancer Society. This is partly due to new and improved screening methods and treatments that weren’t around 50 years ago. Mammograms, colonoscopies, and Pap smears are recommended screening tests that help diagnose breast, colorectal, and cervical cancers early, often before patients even have symptoms of the disease. Improved chemotherapy drugs and targeted treatments like antibodies contribute to prolonged survival once an individual is diagnosed with cancer.
While the downtrend in cancer mortality is promising, it is still estimated that 610,000 Americans will die from cancer in 2022. In addition, the mortality rate for some of the rarer cancers has stagnated or increased in recent years. Now is not the time to slow down in our fight against cancer. Researchers like HudsonAlpha faculty investigator Sara Cooper, PhD , continue their quests to discover new cancer biomarkers, risk genes, treatments, and other screening tools to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer.
TOWARD PRECISION CANCER TREATMENT
Although we often speak about cancer as one disease, it is a large family of different diseases, with each type varying from the next. Even within the cancer subtypes, like breast cancer, each individual’s tumor could be molecularly and genetically unique. As such, there is a big push in the cancer field to introduce more personalized cancer care, tailoring therapeutic choices based on the genomic profile of each patient’s cancer. Dr. Cooper’s lab focuses its research efforts on under- standing mechanisms of cancer pathology, progression, and chemoresistance to help personalize cancer diagnosis and treatment. Her lab recently set out to characterize an exceptionally heterogeneous and deadly type of cancer, ovarian cancer. An estimated 12,810 women are expected to die from ovarian cancer in 2022 due largely to inad- equate early screening and a high incidence of disease recurrence after treatment.
Faculty Investigator Sara Cooper, PhD (l) and Graduate student Carter Wright (r), study cancer to help pinpoint new drug targets to overcome current cancer treatment limitations
HUDSONALPHA INSTITUTE FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY
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