MedTrace Logo

Mesothelin as a New Tumor Marker for Ovarian Cancer

NCT00155740 · Status: UNKNOWN · Type: OBSERVATIONAL · Enrollment: 250

Last updated 2005-11-28

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Ovarian cancer became a more and more important disease in recent years due to its first mortality rate of gynecologic malignancies. The incidence of ovarian cancer also increased in recent year in Taiwan. The lack of symptoms, difficulties in early diagnosis, insufficient accurate tumor markers, and lack of information about ovarian tumor biology contribute to the poor prognosis in ovarian cancer patients. The prognostic parameters for ovarian carcinomas are tumor stage, histologic subtype, degree of malignancy, and residual tumor after surgical treatment. However, these factors present an incomplete picture of the tumor biology of ovarian cancer and are frequently interrelated. Thus, the identification of new biologic factors predictive of individual disease course and prognosis would be extremely useful.

Detection of tumor markers that are released into the circulation can aid in the diagnosis and/or monitoring of therapeutic responses of patients with various tumors, including carcinomas of ovary. CA125 is the most commonly used serum marker for patients with ovarian carcinoma. Although it has proven clinically valuable in monitoring the response of patients to therapy, some ovarian carcinomas do not express CA125, and CA125 often is increased in patients with inflammatory disease. Thus, there is a need for improvement, either in the form of a more specific and/or sensitive assay or an assay that uses a different marker and can be used to complement CA125 toward the goal to improve patient survival by improving diagnosis.

Mesothelin is a 40-kDa glycosylphosphatidylinositol-linked glycoprotein. In normal tissues, the expression of mesothelin has subsequently been shown to be largely restricted to mesothelial cells, although immunoreactivity has also been reported in epithelial cells of the trachea, tonsil, fallopian tube, and kidney. Mesothelin has been shown to be over-expressed in pancreatic carcinomas, gastric carcinoma and ovarian carcinoma, and it seems that mesothelin may be utilized as a new tumor marker for ovarian carcinoma. We will evaluate that if mesothelin can be a new potential tumor marker for ovarian cancer in this proposal.

Conditions

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • National Taiwan University Hospital

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Chi-An Chen, MD · National Taiwan University Hospital

Eligibility

Min Age
15 Years
Max Age
90 Years
Sex
FEMALE
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2002-01-31
Completion
2006-12-31

Countries

  • Taiwan

Study Locations

More Related Trials

Entities

Diseases

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT00155740 on ClinicalTrials.gov