MELBOURNE, Nov. 12 (Xinhua) -- Australian scientists have created a blood test to guide more effective ovarian cancer treatment, by identifying women more likely to respond to an ovarian cancer treatment known as PARP inhibitor therapy.
The breakthrough stems from the four-year SOLACE2 clinical trial involving 15 Australian hospitals, according to a statement released Wednesday by Australia's Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), which co-led the trial with leading Australian medical research centers.
The team's results, published in Nature Communications, reveal that the RMIT-patented biomarkers, easily identified through a simple blood test, may be a better guide to who will potentially benefit from PARP inhibitor therapy than the current gold standard HRD (homologous recombination deficiency) test.
"In SOLACE2, we demonstrated that a new immune test could better indicate which women will respond to PARP inhibitors," said RMIT's Distinguished Professor Magdalena Plebanski, the study's co-senior author.
"We expect this promising new test will enable more effective screening and identification of eligible patients for PARP inhibitors," said Plebanski.
The new blood test detects a "biomarker signature" in blood by measuring immune biomarkers that indicate cancer-fighting immune cells moving toward hidden cancer cells, along with markers of inflammation that promote cancer growth and resistance, researchers said.
Although not yet ready for clinical use, the findings reveal this new test has the potential to transform outcomes for women diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which affects more than 300,000 women annually, helping clinicians to better personalize treatments, they said. ■