Potential therapeutic target identified for ovarian cancer

The findings of a new study done by the University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers reveal that a gene called DOT1L appears to play a role in the progression and severity of ovarian cancer.

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It also found that inhibitors of the DOT1L enzyme may offer a new therapeutic approach for the disease. These findings were published in the journal Oncogenesis. The need is clear despite decades of work to develop new treatment modalities; the five-year survival of patients with advanced ovarian cancer is between 10 and 30 per cent. Others have found that DOT1L is overexpressed in several cancer types, and recent clinical work has shown synergistic antiproliferative activity for a DOT1L inhibitor against MLL-rearranged leukaemia. The UAB researchers, led by Romi Gupta, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics, now show that DOT1L promotes ovarian cancer tumour growth by stimulating pro-tumorigenic metabolic pathways and blocking the programmed cell death called apoptosis. Gupta and colleagues first looked at data sets from patients. They found that DOT1L expression was significantly high