2014 Early Career Investigator Grant Recipient — Barbara Stulken Norquist, MD
Project Summary
PARP inhibitors are a promising new class of drugs for the treatment of ovarian cancer. They work by taking advantage of a cancer’s inability to repair its own DNA. Ovarian cancers from women who carry mutations in the DNA repair genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 have defective DNA repair, and are uniquely susceptible to PARP inhibitors. Mutations in other genes affecting DNA repair, either those that are inherited or those that develop within cancers may also predict response to PARP inhibitors. Other measurable features within the tumor may also predict response.
We seek to measure multiple biomarkers in both blood and tumors in order to predict response to PARP inhibitors. We will do this by assessing blood and tumor samples from women enrolled in a clinical trial of the PARP inhibitor rucaparib for recurrent ovarian cancer. We will use advanced genomic sequencing to test blood and tumors for mutations in a panel of 56 DNA-repair genes, along with other changes that might predict defective DNA repair. We will then look at those findings to see which features were most predictive of responding to the PARP inhibitor on the clinical trial. We hope to use these data to develop clinically useful tests to predict which women with ovarian cancer will have the best chance of responding to a PARP inhibitor, to allow the most rational and cost effective use of this promising therapy.
This grant was made possible in part by a generous donation from Ovarian Cycle Chicago.