PMID: 9633840Jun 20, 1998Paper

Genetics and ovarian carcinoma

Seminars in Oncology
H T LynchA K Godwin

Abstract

Ovarian cancer is a disease that will affect approximately 1% of American women during their lifetime, and contributes to more than 14,000 deaths annually. If not detected early, this disease has a 5-year survival rate of less than 20%. Ovarian cancer develops predominantly from the malignant transformation of a single cell type, the surface epithelium. Although the biological mechanisms of transformation remain unclear, it is probably a multistep process requiring an accumulation of genetic lesions in a number of different gene classes. Several proto-oncogenes, such as AKT2 and Ki-RAS, are activated during ovarian cancer development, with putative oncogene-containing chromosomal regions showing imbalances and DNA amplifications. A number of chromosomal regions are also lost in ovarian tumors, indicating that the inactivation of tumor suppressor genes, such as TP53, may also contribute to cancer development. An important recent advancement in the field of ovarian cancer research is the identification of the breast/ovarian cancer susceptibility genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Mutations in these two tumor suppressor genes are responsible for the majority of heritable forms of epithelial ovarian cancers. A second class of genes involved i...Continue Reading

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