Funding outcome

Most ovarian cancers are diagnosed at late stages when the disease has spread to the abdominal cavity. Current chemotherapy regimens are ineffective against advanced ovarian cancer. In order to develop novel and more effective treatment approaches, we need to understand how cancer cells survive chemotherapy, become resistant to therapies, and eventually form new tumors, which lead to recurrence of the disease. Expression of a protein called ZIC2 is elevated in ovarian cancer and its expression is positively associated with poor survival of ovarian cancer patients. Thus far, little is known about how ZIC2 controls the behavior of ovarian cancer cells. We developed this project to address this question and to determine if targeting ZIC2 can be an effective treatment option for ovarian cancer. Findings from this study could lead to identification of novel therapeutic targets to treat ovarian cancer, which has great potential to improve clinical outcomes of ovarian cancer patients.