Ovarian Cancer Vaccine

June 1, 2009 SYMPTOMS: As in all cancers, the sooner ovarian cancer is diagnosed, the better a chance the patient has at recovery. Unfortunately, ovarian cancer is hard to detect early and often caught in the late stages of the disease. The National Cancer Institute says to watch out for the following symptoms:

Heavy feeling in the pelvis

Pain in the lower abdomen

Bleeding from the vagina

Weight gain or weight loss

Abnormal periods

Unexplained back pain that worsens

Nausea, vomiting, gas or loss of appetite

Recognizing those symptoms and seeking treatment could mean the difference between life or death. "There are no good screening strategies right now for ovarian cancer," Kunle Odunsi, M.D., Ph.D., professor of gynecologic oncology at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y., told Ivanhoe. "Unlike breast cancer, where you have a mammogram, colon cancer, where you have colonoscopy, prostate [cancer], where you have PSA, or cervical cancer, where you have PAP smears, for ovarian, there are no tests available to detect the disease at an early stage."

VACCINATION AS TREATMENT: Traditional treatment options for ovarian cancer include chemotherapy, surgery and radiation therapy. Intraperitoneal chemotherapy is often used in the treatment of ovarian cancer and involves delivering drugs through a catheter directly into the abdomen. Researchers are looking into new drugs to treat ovarian cancer including a vaccine that helps the body recognize cancer as foreign and go on the attack against it. Researchers hope this therapy will prevent the recurrence of cancer better than chemotherapy since the body is the attacker rather than a drug. They also hope treatments like this vaccine can improve the survival rate of ovarian cancer patients, which is estimated to be around 20 to 25 percent after 5 years. "There has been no significant improvement of those numbers over the past 30 years, and we're hoping that some of these strategies will lead our patients to live longer with a good quality of life without many of the side effects of prolonged chemotherapy," Dr. Odunsi, lead author of the vaccine study, said.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

Deborah Pettibone
(716) 868-6182
Deborah.pettibone@roswellpark.org