2025 Report to the Community - Flipbook - Page 26
Discovery & Innovation Highlights
Modeling gynecologic
cancers
Most uterine cancers have excellent five-year survival rates
– up to 95% for localized cancer. Serous uterine cancer is an
exception, with five-year survival rates of 35% to 50% for
Stage 1 or 2 cancer.
were created specifically for ovarian cancers that develop
because of mutations on the PTEN or BRCA genes, which
account for a minority of all ovarian cancers.
“That leaves you with 75% of patients who don’t have an
adequate genetic model,” he said. These genetic models are
instrumental in understanding how cancer develops and in
developing and testing new drugs.
But researchers at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center say that
in the course of developing a new model for ovarian cancer,
they’ve developed additional evidence that serous uterine
cancer possibly begins in the fallopian tubes, not the uterus.
In other words, it’s already metastatic by the time that it’s
found in the uterus.
That led his team, seven years ago, to begin developing a
new ovarian cancer model. Instead of building a model that
relies on removing tumor suppressors, they built a model
using the MYC oncogene, which helps as much as 70%
of all human cancers to grow. The MYC oncogene hadn’t
previously been used in an ovarian cancer model. For this
model, they paired it with a promoter, telling it to go to the
fallopian tubes.
Joe Delaney, Ph.D., first decided to build an ovarian cancer
model for the simple reason that there wasn’t one that
applied to most ovarian cancer patients.
The result was cancer in both the ovaries and the uterus.
There are some existing models, Delaney noted. But they
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Delaney is now continuing work to definitively establish the
source of serous uterine carcinoma.
MUSC Hollings Cancer Center
