Background, Mission and Goals
Biomarkers to enable earlier detection of ovarian cancer are lacking. Data from randomized trials suggest that the current best available screening combination of biomarker CA-125 plus ultrasound imaging shows no clear reduction in ovarian cancer mortality for screened women, in comparison to unscreened controls.
Though further circulating biomarkers have been identified in studies on prevalent cancer cases and cancer-free controls, these biomarkers generally either lack tumor-specificity (e.g., they may be related to inflammation associated with advanced cancer), or they have insufficient sensitivity for the detection of smaller and earlier-stage tumors.
To overcome these issues, and with the aim of identifying markers that can detect disease before usual time of diagnosis, we have established "PREDICT" – a consortium of several of the world's largest prospective cohort studies, to facilitate biomarker discovery and validation in samples collected up to 18 months prior to clinical diagnosis.
