A new study has revealed that a new blood test allowing doctors to predict which ovarian cancer patients will respond to particular types of treatment for ovarian cancer.
Researchers from The University of Manchester and The Christie NHS Foundation Trust looked at blood samples from patients enrolled in an international trial of bevacizumab. These patients received either standard chemotherapy treatment alone or chemotherapy plus the blood vessel-targeting drug.
The recent advance has been to target the development of new blood vessels within the tumour - preventing the cancer from receiving the nutrients it needs to grow.
Professor Gordon Jayson, Professor of Medical Oncology at The University of Manchester and Honorary Consultant at The Christie who jointly led the study, said that they are keen to identify predictive biomarkers - measures that can indicate how well a patient will respond to treatment - so we can better target these drugs to patients most likely to benefit and have investigated levels of a range of proteins in patients' pre-treatment blood samples to see if any were associated with improved survival.
The findings show that two particular proteins - Ang1 and Tie2 - could be used in combination to predict patient response. Patients with high levels of Ang1 and low levels of Tie2 were most likely to benefit from bevacizumab. Both these proteins are involved in controlling the formation of new blood vessels. Conversely, they found that patients with high levels of both proteins did not benefit from the additional drug.
The study was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.