Interrogating the relationship between tumour microenvironment and its infiltrating immune cells in high-grade serous ovarian cancer

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Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of death from cancer amongst women and leads to over 4000 deaths each year in the UK. Although 80% of patients initially respond to chemotherapy, the majority will, unfortunately, develop resistance to currently available treatment options and suffer a recurrence of the disease. The mechanisms underpinning the acquisition of drug resistance are far from being fully understood. Therefore, it has become increasingly clear that identifying new approaches for treatment is important in the management of this disease. One of the most interesting areas of cancer research is how our immune system fights cancer, but such "immunotherapy" has been poorly effective in ovarian cancer to date. To understand and overcome this, we will collect ovarian tumour tissue from 30 patients both before and after chemotherapy and use modern sequencing techniques to analyse the gene profiles of individual tumour and immune cells. In this way we hope to be able to identify how tumour cells become resistant to chemotherapy and immune control. We will use our research findings to develop new therapeutic approaches to overcome this. As such we aim to identify new treatment opportunities for women with this very challenging disease.