Casting a new light on GYN cancers
Technology in fight against reproductive system tumors
Ronny Drapkin, MD, PhD, uses a special camera to pinpoint the location of tumors in laboratory animals.
Though striking only a fraction as many women as breast cancer, tumors of the reproductive system often pose longer odds against survival.Roughly one in five women diagnosed with breast cancer will die of the disease. For malignancies of the reproductive system — cancers of the uterus, ovaries, cervix, and other tissues — the overall mortality rate is closer to one in three.
Those distressing (though improving) statistics must be balanced, however, against a wealth of new research into the causes of gynecologic cancers and better techniques for diagnosing and treating them. Within the Women's Cancers Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), a growing number of young scientists have made gynecologic cancers the focus of their research. They are chipping away at what represents the great unknown about these diseases — the genetic alterations that occur in their earliest stages. As this information becomes clearer, doctors will be in a better position to not only treat but also prevent diseases that, as a group, annually strike more than 80,000 women in the United States and kill more than 26,000.
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