Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

As the most lethal gynaecological cancer, ovarian cancers not only threaten lives of many women worldwide, but health side effects also burdens the life of millions patients following treatments. Novel therapeutic methods aiming at increasing the long-term survival of patients and decreasing health side effects associated with treatment is critical. We have already found that current chemotherapy or ionizing radiation protocols induce a very interesting phenomenon - cellular senescence - in treated cells in addition to cell death. Senescence is recognized by arrest of cancer cell proliferation and it is thought to be beneficial in cancer therapy under certain conditions. The high recurrence of ovarian cancer could be due to the proliferation of cells that by pass treatments and be able t divide and migrate. Therefore, leading to complete senescence of cancer cells could reduce the viability of cells and decrease of the recurrence rate of this cancer. Combined treatments of other anti-cancer drugs (5-aza-deoxycytidine and palbociclib) prior to normal chemo and IR treatment increases the percentage of senescent cells after treatments. These drugs lead to modification of genetic material instead of direct mutation of DNA. Thus, in addition to reinforce the effect of chemo and IR, the pre-treatment of those drugs also have fewer side effects to the patients. We would like to deeply explore the mechanisms of treatment-induced senescence in ovarian cancer and to manipulate it to benefit patients. We also want to explore more combination of drugs and therapies that make the cellular senescence as a major response of therapeutic treatment.