Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) is the leading cause of death within gynecological cancers in the developed countries. Due to the lack of specific symptoms, EOC is often detected at an advanced stage with a five-year survival rate less than 40%. However, 25% of EOC patients are diagnosed in early stage (I-II), where the disease is often cured by surgery alone, or in combination with platinum-based chemotherapy. Even though the prognosis of patients with FIGO stage I-II increases dramatically with treatment, with five-year survival rates between 80–90%, some subgroups of early-stage EOC will relapse and 20–30% of these patients will finally succumb to the disease. Nevertheless, the optimal clinical management is still a controversial debate and patients with early-stage high-grade serous EOC might be over-treated which could potentially result in complications after radical surgical management and an increase in toxicity of chemotherapy. Hence, it is of utmost importance to identify novel diagnostic markers for this patient cohort in order to improve the risk assessment of tumor recurrence. Here, we have applied MALDI-imaging mass spectrometry (MALDI-IMS), a new method to identify distinct mass profiles including protein signatures on paraffin embedded tissue sections. In search of prognostic biomarker candidates, we compared proteomic profiles of primary tumor section from early-stage HGSOC patients with either recurrent or non-recurrent disease, and were able to identify a discriminative peptide signature to predict clinical outcome and treatment extent for patients with early-stage HGSOC.
Kulbe H., ... , Kassuhn W., et al., Discovery of Prognostic Markers for Early-Stage High-Grade Serous Ovarian Cancer by Maldi-Imaging, Cancers 2020