Industry and investigator initiated clinical trial as well as real world evidence to evaluate ovarian cancer patient response to targeted therapeutics

Project goals:

1. Profile specimens to constitute a discovery platform to identify signatures for ovarian cancer responders and non-responders to specific targeted therapies.
2. Integrate this cohort into a larger pan-Canadian initiative.

Summary:

For decades now, the first line therapy proposed to woman affected with epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) has been a combination of platinum and taxane. While initial response is high, most patients relapse following treatment and the five-year survival rate remains around 45%. More recently, targeted therapies, either alone or in combination, are either being tested in clinical trials or have been approved as standard of care. One of the challenges in this rare cancer is 1) to determine the most efficient treatment combination for a given patient and 2) to identify mechanisms of innate and acquired resistance to targeted therapies.

For this initiative, we will take advantage of the retrospective cohort of patients, as well as a prospective cohort of women, who received a targeted therapy from whom tissue and blood specimens are available in the CTRNet certified ovarian cancer biobank of the CRCHUM. In addition to the real-world cohort of patients receiving these targeted therapies at the CHUM, the clinical research team, led by Dr Provencher, is presently performing several multi-center pharma and investigator initiated clinical trials testing new agents or combination of these. This will provide us with the opportunity to collect longitudinal patient specimens at different key clinical endpoints.

The genomic profiling of these new specimens will help us to validate previously identified signatures on a larger cohort. Altogether, the proposed two approaches will allow us to better address the recurring theme in the treatment of EOC: the inability to stratify patients correctly in an era of multiple treatment options.