
doi: 10.5772/27664
Recent microarray technology and bioinformatics have shown the ability of analysing oncogenic cellular signalling pathways based upon gene signatures in cancers. (Bild et al., 2006; Dressman et al., 2007; Gatza et al., 2010) Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the most important cause of mortality among gynaecological cancers. Patients with EOC often present in an advanced stage. Treatment modalities consist in general of the sequence of surgical cytoreduction and platinum-taxane based chemotherapy. (Cannistra, 2004) Although the disease is relatively sensitive to cytotoxics, relapses occur in a majority of patients with advanced stage. (Cannistra, 2004) The emergence of resistance to conventional chemotherapeutics is an often-deadly event in the management of ovarian cancer patients. There is an urgent need for additional therapies that increase survival and/or quality of life in these patients. The objective of our study was to look for cellular pathways that have an effect on survival outcome by a bioinformatical approach. (Trinh et al., 2011) These pathways may guide us to find interesting targets in ovarian cancer. Survival can be used as a measure to quantify the biological relevance in this disease. Ideally, evaluation of survival outcome should be made in a homogenous population with a uniform treatment to avoid treatment-induced biases and uniform histology to find subtler differences independent from histology. Another methodology of estimating prognostic value may be the correlation with documented prognostic gene signatures that have shown to be of prognostic value in breast cancer and other types of cancer. The invasiveness gene signature (IGS) was generated using stem celllike or tumorigenic breast cancer cells.(Liu et al., 2007) This signature has shown prognostic value in lung cancer, medulloblastoma and prostate cancer. The Wound healing response (WHR) signature, based upon genes induced by wound healing, also has shown its prognostic value in breast cancer, NSLC and bladder cancer. (Chang et al., 2005; Lauss, Ringner, & Hoglund, 2010; Mostertz et al., 2010) The genomic grade index (GGI) is a signature that divides low-grade versus high-grade breast carcinomas. (Sotiriou et al., 2006) Interestingly, using this signature, histological intermediate-grade tumours could be classified as lowor high-grade tumours with the preservation of the gene signatures’ prognostic value.
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