Ovarian Cancer Research Group (OCRG)

The ovarian cancer is the leading cause of death among all gynecological malignancies. This is chiefly due to the difficulty and the absence of efficient tools to achieve an early screening for the disease. Since the absence of specific and obvious symptoms of the disease, most (over 90%) of the cases are diagnosed in advanced stages or metastasis. This is due to our inability to detect early tumors and to find out the key players involved in the progression of this disease. At these early stages, the symptoms are indistinguishable, aspecific delaying thus the chances of diagnosis. Moreover, the molecular pathways underlying the progression pathology of the OC are still mysterious. Finding an effective molecular screening technique/approach and/or biomarkers allowing the early detection of this pathology continues to be challenging and represents the major goal of this research group.

To understand the etiology and the progression of this disease at the molecular level, a deep analysis using cutting-edge and overlapped high-throughput techniques to pick up key factors and/ or pathways and/ or biomarkers involved is highly recommended. Another key parameter to be considered is the large heterogeneity of these cancers, and therefore the clinicopathological molecular processes specific to each stage are still poorly defined.

This OCRG will use several high-throughput and innovative technologies (microarrays, DNA methylome analysis, Next Generation Sequencing, functional epigenomics, …) to demystify the molecular pathway of this disease, identify early detection biomarkers and suggest potential therapeutic targets for subsequent clinical trials.

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