Ovarian Cancer Canada states a woman in Canada will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer every three and a half hours. A woman in Canada will die from ovarian cancer every five hours.
On August 19, 2024, Diana Austin, professor emerita of the University of New Brunswick, lost her life to ovarian cancer after being diagnosed as stage four, terminal in June 2023. In her obituary, she left behind an important message for all women: “I’m dying from this sneaky disease, but I’m writing this so that other women realize that they don’t have to … a few years ago I seemed to be a reasonably healthy woman for my age, but suddenly I too became a statistic: one more Canadian woman caught off-guard when an emergency room visit for an apparent minor matter turned into the horrible news that I actually had terminal ovarian cancer. I had no obvious symptoms, and my main risk factor was simply being female.”
Ovarian cancer is known as the “silent killer” and the “cancer that whispers.” Symptoms of the disease may include abdominal, pelvic, and/or back pain, bloating, frequent urination, weight loss, low appetite, and fatigue. These symptoms are broad and often dismissed by healthcare providers as symptoms of menstruation or gastrointestinal issues, among other common ailments. As a result, ovarian cancer often goes undiagnosed, until it has metastasized and reached later, and often fatal stages.
There is currently no appropriate screening for ovarian cancer either. The most common screening is the CA-125 test which measures levels of a protein, known as cancer antigen 125, which has shown to be elevated approximately 50 percent in early stages of ovarian cancer and 80 percent in later stages. However, many other conditions may elevate levels of the antigen such as endometriosis, pregnancy, and uterine fibroids. False positives are highly common. Due to its usual late detection, ovarian cancer is the fifth most fatal cancer for the female sex.
University of Oxford scientists have secured funding of up to £600,000 GBP (over $1,000,000 CAD) over the next three years from Cancer Research UK to further their studies on designing a vaccine for ovarian cancer. The vaccine is named OvarianVax. It focuses on the identification and removal of early-stage ovarian cancer through the immune system. “In this study, the Cancer Research UK-funded scientists will establish the targets for the vaccine. They will find out which proteins on the surface of early-stage ovarian cancer cells are most strongly recognized by the immune system and how effectively the vaccine kills mini-models of ovarian cancer called organoids,” said the University of Oxford in an article on the university website.
Currently, OvarianVax is focused primarily on women with BRCA1 (breast cancer gene I) and BRCA2 (breast cancer gene II), the genes responsible for producing DNA-repairing proteins, with inherited mutations that elevate the risk of developing ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
OvarianVax does not propose to be a cure though. The short-term goal is for it to act as a vaccine, focused on preventing the formation of ovarian cancer in individuals with BRCA I and BRCA II mutations. The long-term goal is that in the future, all women may benefit from the preventive measures of OvarianVax.
While OvarianVax is not designed to be a cure, there has been ongoing research on whether or not the vaccine could supplement other therapies to improve the life expectancy of those already diagnosed.
Currently, there is one preventive measure that allows women to evade ovarian cancer, arising from a long-running study at the University of British Columbia, an opportunistic salpingectomy, the removal of the fallopian tubes. The procedure is safe, straightforward, and entirely elective.
The following is an excerpt from Austin’s message entitled “Ovarian Cancer and The Power of KNOWLEDGE to give you choices,” included in her obituary: “Please help spread the word about this new Canadian research so that other women and those who care about them know that women now have the power of choice to try to ensure a better outcome for their own futures. If they want to, women can now CHOOSE to act upon this new knowledge. At the appropriate stage of their own reproductive lives, when they consider themselves to have the family size they want, women can choose to have an opportunistic salpingectomy and thus virtually eliminate the likelihood that ovarian cancer will start growing undetected in their own bodies before ending up claiming their lives, as it has done mine.”
To read Austin’s full message and learn more about ovarian cancer, please visit her obituary at mcadamsfh.com.
