Prognostic Significance of Genomic Rearrangement Patterns in High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer
Posted: Thursday, March 29, 2018
A novel genomic rearrangement signature seems to be associated with poor prognosis in patients with high-grade serous ovarian cancer, according to research published by R. Tyler Hillman, MD, of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, and colleagues in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Clinical and whole-genome sequencing data for 80 primary high-grade advanced-stage serous ovarian cancer tumors were obtained retrospectively from the Australian Ovarian Cancer Study. An independent cohort from The Cancer Genome Atlas Ovarian Cancer Study (n = 490) was also analyzed to identify clinically relevant genomic rearrangement signatures. The Australian cohort was dichotomized around the median signature contribution, and the independent cohort was dichotomized around the median similarity between tumor copy number profile and a prognostic rearrangement signature. Overall survival was analyzed for both cohorts.
Five genomic rearrangement signatures in high-grade serous ovarian cancer were identified. Patients whose tumors exhibited a high contribution from Ov.RS3 had poor overall survival, with a median of 22.7 months versus 38.2 months in the Ov.RS3-low group. In the independent cohort, the median overall survival rate was 38 months in the Ov.RS3 high–similarity group compared with 48.9 months in the Ov.RS3 low–similarity group, the investigators reported.
“Prospective validation of the prognostic value of Ov.RS3 would result in a clinically applicable biomarker of [high-grade serous ovarian cancer] behavior,” concluded the investigators. “Such a biomarker could be used to identify patients with a poor prognosis who may be candidates for clinical trials in the adjuvant setting.”
