Personalized cancer therapy for ovarian cancer patients.

e16521 Background: The treatment of ovarian cancer consists principally in radical surgery followed by chemotherapy. Patients generally respond well to first line chemotherapy (70%) but consistently relapse within 18 months, with successive rounds of chemotherapy offering low patient benefit. Despite every cancer being unique, all cancer patients are generally treated by the same chemotherapy regimes. An approach used in the past has been to use chemosensitivity assays based on cells isolated from solid tumors to predict chemotherapy response. However, recent advances have demonstrated that the metastatic cancer cell is distinct to that found in the primary tumor and is thus the true target of chemotherapy. Methods: We have developed in-house techniques to expand and enrich in stem cell markers, cancer cells isolated from ascitic fluid. Our objective was to isolate these potential ovarian metastatic cells from patients and coorelate their in vitro response to the chemotherapy observed in the patient. Prim...