VIDEO: Diagnostic challenges in ovarian cancer

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So one of the biggest challenges in ovarian cancer, and it's really remained a challenge for decades now, is our inability to detect the cancer in the early stages where we have the best opportunity for cure. So just to give you some numbers, right? If a woman is diagnosed with a Stage 1 ovarian cancer, her five-year survival rate is above 90%. If it's diagnosed at subsequent stages, so once the tumor has gone beyond the confines of the ovary and the sort of structures around it, that five-year survival rate drops. And, unfortunately, the majority of patients, 75 to 80% of patients get diagnosed at late stage, stage 3 and 4 disease, where the five-year survival rate hovers just under 30% and hasn't really gotten any better in the last few decades. One of the things we're excited about more recently, though, is the development of new modalities that may actually help us detect cancer early. And so many folks have heard of liquid biopsies, and there are a number of companies and research efforts underway to see whether we can use blood to tell us that there's a cancer in a particular patient. And so there is one particular effort I'm familiar with because we've collaborated with Dr. Victor Velculescu at Hopkins, who's developed a liquid biopsy called DELFI which uses shallow whole genome sequencing to look for changes in the fragmentation pattern of the DNA. And they've shown that the fragmentation patterns change if you have cancer. But not only that, it actually is different depending on the origin of the cancer. So using AI, they're not only able to say whether you have a cancer or not, but where it's likely coming from. There was a recent report at the most recent ACR meeting, there was a press release where they showed that this liquid biopsy called DELFI, D-E-L-F-I, was able to detect early-stage cancers more efficiently than CA125, which is sort of the gold standard at this point, and that's not useful for early detection. So there's reason to have some hope that technology has gotten to a point where maybe we'll be able to do this in the future using liquid biopsy. So that's one positive thing I think that's emerged. Hopefully, it'll have an impact on overall survival on these patients.