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Approximately 21,550 women were diagnosed with Ovarian Cancer (OVCA) in 2009 and 14,600 died from their disease, making it the number one killer of women among gynecological cancers. Seventy percent of cases of OVCA are not detected until the disease has progressed to stage III or stage IV. Both diagnosis and aggressive treatments for late-stage OVCA can have a negative impact on women's psychosocial well-being resulting in anxiety, depression, and fear. The purpose of this integrative review of literature was to evaluate interventions designed to improve psychosocial well-being in women with OVCA. This review of literature was conducted using the CINAHL, PsycINFO, and MEDLINE databases using various key terms including "ovarian cancer or neoplasm" and "psychological and psychosocial", "well-being", "fear or anxiety or depression". Five studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in this review. These interventions include psychosocial, psychoeducational, and personal counseling interventions. The findings indicate that these interventions result in a significant improvement in participant's psychosocial well-being including decreased depressive symptoms, fear, and anxiety. This evidence supports that there is a need for psychosocial intervention in women with OVCA. It also suggests that women with OVCA benefit from tailored interventions and one-on-one educational and counseling sessions. Clinicians can use this information to anticipate potential problems in their client's psychosocial well-being and provide more education and support or refer them for counseling. More research is needed about reducing the psychosocial sequelae that results in women with OVCA.

The treatment of most cancers can still be considered inadequate despite the steady progress being made. A prime example of this issue is with epithelial ovarian cancers; this disease presents a significant issue, with a 5-year survival rate of 46% and a survival rate of 28% in patients that develop metastatic disease. Since ovarian cancer has such a high mortality rate, effective treatment modalities are necessary to prolong the quality of life after diagnosis. Psychosocial stress is related to the progression, proliferation, and migration in cancer patients, but the mechanisms of this relationship are not fully understood. The present in vitro study investigated the ability of oxytocin, a neuropeptide associated with social support, to attenuate the stress response. Catecholamines, a subclass of stress hormones, were used to simulate the stress induced inflammation process in ovarian cancer cells. To evaluate oxytocin’s capacity to attenuate the stress response, the ovarian cancer cell lines SKOV3, HEYA8, OVCAR8, and OV432 were separately treated with the presence or absence of catecholamines with the addition of oxytocin. Protein expression of the oxytocin receptor was investigated using a western blot protocol. Oxytocin receptor, oxytocin, and IL-6 mRNA expression was evaluated by quantitative PCR. Treatment with Oxytocin attenuated the inflammatory response resulting from catecholamine treatment. The oxytocin receptor gene and protein were present in each cell line, suggesting that oxytocin has an anti-inflammatory role in the tumor microenvironment in ovarian cancer patients. These results provide a mechanism by which social support, working through the release of oxytocin, promotes an anti-inflammatory process in ovarian cancer patients. This study may shed light into new pharmacological approaches for the treatment of ovarian cancer.

No / Chloroethylaminoanthraquinones are described with intercalating and alkylating capacity that potentially covalently cross-link topoisomerase II (topo II) to DNA. These compounds have potent cytotoxic activity (IC(50) = 0.9-7.6 nM) against the A2780 human ovarian carcinoma cell line. Hydroxyethylaminoanthraquinones also reported in this paper have similar IC(50) values (0.7-1.7 nM) in the same cell line. Alchemix (ZP281M, 1-(2-[N,N-bis(2-chloroethyl)amino]ethylamino)-4-(2-[N,N-(dimethyl)amino]ethylamino)-5,8-dihydroxy-9,10-anthracenedione), an alkylating anthraquinone, retains excellent antitumor activity in Adriamycin-resistant (2780AD) and cisplatin-resistant (2780/cp70) cell lines in vitro and in vivo. This indicates that Alchemix can evade both P-glycoprotein efflux pump and DNA mismatch repair-mediated resistance. In treated cells, Alchemix was shown to preferentially induce drug-stabilized covalent bound topo IIalpha-DNA complexes over topo IIbeta-DNA complexes.

The purpose of this thesis was to characterize cancer metabolism in vitro using epithelial ovarian cancer as a model on an untargeted, systems-level, basis with particular attention paid to the difference between cancer stem cell metabolism and cancer cell metabolism. Two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry was used to measure the metabolite profiles of the ovarian cancer and cancer stem cell lines under normal baseline conditions and also under chemotherapeutic and environmental perturbations. These two cell lines exhibited significant metabolic differences under normal baseline conditions and results demonstrated that metabolism in the ovarian cancer stem cell line was distinct from that of more differentiated isogenic cancer cells, showing similarities to stem cell metabolism that suggest the potential importance of metabolism for the cancer stem cell phenotype. Glucose deprivation, hypoxia, and ischemia all perturbed ovarian cancer and cancer stem cell metabolism, but not in the same ways between the cell types. Chemotherapeutic treatment with docetaxel caused metabolic changes mostly in amino acid and carbohydrate metabolism in ovarian cancer cells, while ovarian cancer stem cell metabolism was not affected by docetaxel. Overall, these metabolic differences between the two cell types will deepen our understanding of the metabolic changes occurring within the in vivo tumor and will help drive development of cancer stem cell targeted therapeutics.

Recent morphologic and molecular genetic studies have led to a paradigm shift in our conceptualization of the carcinogenesis and histogenesis of pelvic (non-uterine) serous carcinomas. It appears that both low-grade and high-grade pelvic serous carcinomas that have traditionally been classified as ovarian in origin, actually originate, at least in a significant subset, from the distal fallopian tube. Clonal expansions of the tubal secretory cell probably give rise to serous carcinomas, and the degree of ciliated conversion is a function of the degree to which the genetic hits deregulate normal differentiation. In this article, the authors review the evidentiary basis for aforementioned paradigm shift, as well as its potential clinical implications.

BACKGROUND:Neoadjuvant chemotherapy followed by cytoreduction surgery has been used where an accurate cytologic or pathologic diagnosis is usually required before the initiation of neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, it is difficult to make definitive diagnosis of presence of cancer cells, particularly gynecologic versus non-gynecologic origin, from those ascites specimens due to the absence of specific biomarkers of gynecologic cancers. In the present study, we evaluated if, in addition to the routine morphologic diagnosis, the biomarker PAX8 could be useful in recognition of ovarian epithelial cancer cells prior to the neoadjuvant chemotherapy.METHODS:Two hundred and two cytology specimens including 120 pretreatment ovarian cancer samples, 60 benign controls, and 22 malignant non-gynecologic cases were studied. All cytology slides were morphologically reviewed in a blinded fashion without knowing corresponding pathology diagnosis, if present. A total of 168 cytology specimens with a cell block were stained with PAX8 and Calretinin. These included patients with potential for ovarian cancer neoadjuvant chemotherapy (n=96), metastatic cancers (n=22), and benign controls (n=50).RESULTS:Among the 96 ascitic samples prior to neoadjuvant chemotherapy, 76 (79%) showing morphologic features consistent with cancers of ovarian primary were all PAX+/Calretinin-. The remaining 20 (21%) cases were positive for adenocarcinoma, but morphologically unable to be further classified. Among the 22 metastatic cancers into the pelvis, one case with PAX8+/Calretinin- represented a renal cell carcinoma and the remaining 21 PAX8-/Calretinin- metastatic cancers were either breast metastasis (n=4) and the metastasis from gastrointestinal tract (n=17). Among the 50 benign control pelvic washing cases, 5 PAX8+/Calretinin-cases represented endosalpingiosis (n=4) and endometriosis (n=1), 25 PAX8-/Calretinin+cases showed reactive mesothelial cells, and the remaining 20 specimens with PAX8-/Calretinin- phenotype typically contained inflammatory or blood cells without noticeable diagnostic epithelia.CONCLUSIONS:PAX8 identifies all Mullerian derived benign or malignant epithelia. When combining with Calretinin, PAX8 is a sensitive marker to diagnose the carcinomas of ovarian origin, which will be ideal to be used for those patients with a possible advanced ovarian cancer prior to receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

Peptide recognition domains (PRD) bind to short linear motifs on their biological partners and are found in several cellular pathways including those found to be critical in tumorigenesis. In this study, I aimed to generate peptide probes against PRDs present on proteins involved in ovarian cancer. Using bioinformatics, I identified 66 potential PRDs present on these proteins. I then used peptide phage display to successfully generate peptides against 27 of the 66 domains. To validate my results, I performed an extensive literature review and structural analysis. For several cases, the phage-display derived binding preferences are similar to previously reported studies. However, for a subset of domains, I identified non-canonical binding preferences that have not been reported previously in literature. The binding preferences obtained in this study can be used to design intracellular probes for studying the role of these PRDs in biological pathways important in ovarian cancer.