Investigating chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancer

2020

Ovarian cancer causes around 266 women to lose their lives from this disease each year in Ireland. Patients are treated with a given chemotherapy and although most respond initially, when patients fail to respond upon cancer recurrence there is no good drug alternative.

Dr Marion Butler found that ovarian cancer cells that don’t die when treated with this drug grow slower when we block a given protein from working. In this project the team plan to test whether blocking this protein reduces tumour growth using these chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancer cells in animal studies.

Findings from this project will inform us on whether we should explore the targeting of this protein when drug-resistance develops.