According to a release from the University of Helsinki and Helsinki University Hospital, a new genetic test helps identify ovarian cancer patients who would benefit from PARP inhibitors, a type of targeted medication that may be useful in treating ovarian cancer. As a maintenance therapy for patients with newly diagnosed ovarian cancer following surgery and cytostatic therapy, PARP inhibitors have produced remarkable outcomes recently.
The university noted on Wednesday that it is crucial to be able to focus treatment with PARP inhibitors on the patients who will benefit from it the most because it is linked to potentially catastrophic side effects. According to Helsinki University Hospital’s Anniina Farkkila, “the genetic test helps to identify individuals who do not benefit from the medicine, preventing unneeded therapy and the side effects connected with the drug.”
According to the Xinhua news agency, the new DNA test was created with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and statistics. “A particular DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) repair mechanism is absent in about 50% of ovarian tumours. This defect prevents cancer cells from accurately repairing DNA double-strand breaks, which leads to an accumulation of DNA lesions “Fernando Perez-Villatoro, a doctorate student at the University of Helsinki, stated.
The findings of the study demonstrate that each kind of cancer has unique genetic defects connected to homologous recombination DNA-repair deficit (HRD), a frequent cause of genomic instability. The University of Helsinki stated that creating a test that is optimised for ovarian cancer will help increase the accuracy of therapies for this particular cancer type.
