Identifying novel hypoxia-associated markers of chemoresistance in ovarian cancer

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Conclusions

Overall, these results show that the most important determining factor for development of resistance is the presence of hypoxia during the treatment period, not prior to treatment thus highlighting the potential importance of simultaneously reducing tumour hypoxia and treating with chemotherapy. This may have particular importance in patients with large tumours who receive neoadjuvant chemotherapy. A number of pathways are responsible for the resistance to cisplatin observed due to hypoxia, and that there are many candidate biomarkers of hypoxia which could be explored in the context of ovarian cancer. We have also provided an initial validation of selected hypoxia-associated biomarkers in ovarian tumour samples. It will be important to expand the study and to validate these results at the protein level in future studies in order to elucidate their true importance.