CHALLENGE TRANSABILITY OF “IN VITRO” TO “IN VIVO”: GENE-EXPRESSION BIOMARKERS AND FLUORESCENT IMAGE-GUIDED SURGERY PROBES IDENTIFICATION FOR OVARIAN CANCER

Ovarian cancer is the second most prevalent gynecologic malignancy, and the Ovarian Serous Cystadenocarcinoma (OSCA) is the most common and lethal subtype of ovarian cancer. Current screening methods have strong limits in early detection and, despite surgery and chemotherapy, the majority of OSCA patients relapse and eventually succumb to their disease, suggesting that further efforts are required to improve early diagnosis. Furthermore, the identification and removal of all gross and microscopic tumor to render the patient disease free represents a huge challenge in ovarian cancer treatment. The presence of residual disease is an independent negative prognostic factor. In this presentation, it will be described the development and cross-validated method for detecting gene expression biomarkers able to discriminate OSCA tissues from healthy ovarian tissues and from other cancer types with very high accuracy. Then, it will be described the synthesis (Figure), “in vitro” and “in vivo xenograft model” evaluation of ad hoc developed probes for fluorescent image-guided surgery, particularly useful in the resection of not palpable and not visible at naked eye lesions. The probes bearing fluorochromes with different fluorescent properties were used to challenge the transability of “in vitro “results to “in vivo” pre-cilinical model of ovarian cancer built by implanted human ovarian cancer cells in mice.