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

卵巢癌是女性癌症死亡的第五大原因，在英国每年导致4000多人死亡。虽然80%的患者最初对化疗有反应，但不幸的是，大多数患者将对目前可用的治疗方案产生耐药性，并遭受疾病复发。获得耐药性的机制远未得到充分理解。因此，越来越清楚的是，确定新的治疗方法对这种疾病的管理非常重要。癌症研究中最有趣的领域之一是我们的免疫系统如何对抗癌症，但迄今为止，这种“免疫疗法”对卵巢癌的效果很差。为了理解和克服这一点，我们将收集30名患者化疗前后的卵巢肿瘤组织，并使用现代测序技术分析个体肿瘤和免疫细胞的基因谱。通过这种方式，我们希望能够确定肿瘤细胞如何对化疗和免疫控制产生抗性。我们将利用我们的研究成果开发新的治疗方法来克服这一点。因此，我们的目标是为患有这种非常具有挑战性的疾病的妇女确定新的治疗机会。

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.