Project Description:

Associate Professor Stacey Edwards is focused on finding new and more effective treatments for ovarian cancer that also manage recurrence of the disease. This project focuses on high-grade serous ovarian cancer, which is the most common and aggressive type of the disease. PARP inhibitors can be used to treat this type of ovarian cancer. They work by blocking the proteins that are repairing the DNA, leading to more DNA damage and cancer cell death. However, cancer cells often turn DNA repair pathways back on, which means that patients become resistant to this type of treatment, and it stops working. Associate Professor Edwards will investigate whether combining PARP inhibitors or chemotherapy with antisense oligonucleotides (an emerging area of drug development), would improve their effectiveness.