The
USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center recently announced that its team will
expand their ovarian cancer research efforts thanks to the National Institutes
of Health (NIH). The NIH awarded two grants totaling over $4 million to the USC
Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center for use on two important ovarian cancer
research projects.
One
project being funded by these grants will focus on studying how certain genes
and mutations may impact a woman’s risk of developing ovarian cancer. Set to
last at least five years, this project is being led by Simon Gayther, a
professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and
Susan Ramus, an associate professor of preventive medicine.
The
hope is that this project will ultimately contribute to a decreased ovarian
cancer mortality.
“We
expect to identify, in the population, ovarian cancer susceptibility genes that
confer substantial risks of ovarian cancer,” Gayther
said about the project. “We will calculate these risks by comparing the
frequency of gene mutations in ovarian cancer cases compared to unaffected
controls. We expect the size of disease risks caused by these genes to be quite
substantial, and anticipate this information could soon be used to screen
unaffected women in the population to identify those individuals at greatest
risk.”
In
addition to working on this first project, Susan Ramus is leading the second
ovarian cancer research study being funded by these grants. This second
project, which is currently the world’s largest ovarian cancer tumor tissue
study, will evaluate signs of ovarian cancer risk at a molecular level. This
could help researchers develop new ways of testing for and treating ovarian
cancer and is a significant endeavor, as no treatment for ovarian cancer
based on tumor profiling currently exists.
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