HIPEC for ovarium carcinoma (OV-HIPEC)
Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC) is a combination of surgery and chemotherapy that is being used in patients with peritoneal metastases from colorectal cancer. After surgical removal of visible tumors and metastases, heated chemotherapy is circulated in the abdomen to treat possible residual disease. Many patients with ovarian carcinoma face peritoneal metastases as well. That’s why gynecologist Willemien van Driel and colleagues performed a large clinical trial with HIPEC in these patients (OVHIPEC). This study recently showed that the treatment increases the 5-year overall survival by 10 percent.
MammaPrint
MammaPrint, also known as the 70-gene signature, was developed between 2000 and 2002 in the Rene Bernards lab as a tool to help identify patients with early-stage breast cancer that can safely forego chemotherapy. Once the 70-gene signature had been discovered and validated in a first independent validation cohort, clinicians like Sabine Linn and surgeon Emiel Rutgers were crucial for the validation studies RASTER and MINDACT that helped in clinical acceptance of the gene signature.