Ross Berkowitz, MD and Ursula A. Matulonis, MD and Zhigang Charles Wang, MD, PhD

This research group at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital is investigating the genomic features associated with therapy response and shared by high grade serous ovarian tumors and triple negative breast cancer. The results of their study demonstrate the number of broken chromosomes may be useful for predicting disease recurrence in ovarian cancer patients who received platinum-based treatment, which appears similar to that in triple negative breast cancer. In the past year, Drs. Berkowitz, Matulonis, and Wang found a small subset of ovarian cancers lacking deletion of chromosome 13 have a high rate of therapy resistance, suggesting other genes on this chromosome play a role in sensitivity to platinum chemotherapy. They also built a dataset using a clinically applicable genome-wide assay to detect chromosomal aberrations and mutations simultaneously in a new cohort of patients treated in Boston for the validation of their findings and identifying the common and important genomic predictors. In the coming year, this team proposes to extend their genomic study to tumor tissues from two clinical trials of patients treated by new targeted therapy with PARP inhibitors.