A breakthrough discovery regarding the detection and diagnosis of ovarian cancer have been published in the online journal Nature Cell Biology. Scientists at the Institute Of Medical Biology, and the Bioinformatics Institute of A*STAR, or Agency for Science, Technology And Research, in Singapore have discovered new signs that will help in the early detection and individualized treatment of ovarian cancer. This type of cancer is currently one of the most difficult cases to diagnose in its earliest stages because of the lack of unique symptoms indicating the presence of the disease.
Currently, ovarian cancer is one of the three most dominant types of cancer that affect women. The other two are breast cancer and womb cancer. Ovarian cancer has caused the greatest concern of the three because it is only typically diagnosed when it has already reached its advanced stages because it has no clear early warning signs. Consequently, administering successful treatment often becomes an impossibility, and whatever therapy does get meted out could already be ineffective at those stages, thus resulting in high mortality rates.
Very recently, scientists were able to successfully identify the unique biomarker of a variance themselves that will allow earlier detection of the cancer, does paving the way for treatment at the earliest stages of the disease. The molecule known as "Lgr5" was identified on the subsection of cells located on the surface of the ovarian epithelium. The Lgr5 molecule has already been previously used to identify themselves in different types of tissues including the stomach and intestines. However, this is the first time that scientists were able to successfully identify this important biomarker in ovarian tissues. Since its discovery, scientists have already come across a multitude of epithelial stem cells in the ovaries that produce the molecule. They found that the cells responsible for the production of the life-saving Lgr5 molecule are also the same ones that are responsible for the development of the ovaries.