About 1,300 women with some form of gynecologic cancer come to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center each year, including more than 100 patients with newly diagnosed cases of ovarian cancer, as well as some 100 patients with a recurrent form of the disease.
Early Intervention
Improving the detection and management of ovarian cancer is a major research goal at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. As part of our efforts to develop accurate methods of detecting ovarian cancer in its early stages, the Gynecologic Disease Management Team has established the Ovarian Cancer Screening & Prevention Program, which is a clinical program for women at high risk of developing ovarian cancer.
Individualized Treatment Plans
Ovarian cancer is difficult to treat successfully, and patients should seek out a center with a great deal of experience treating this disease. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering, treatment plans are customized to each individual patient and incorporate the input of a team of experts. A multidisciplinary approach is very important in cancer care because many patients have more than one type of treatment, which may include surgery, chemotherapy, and other therapies. Collaboration among surgeons, medical oncologists, and radiation oncologists from the very beginning of treatment optimizes patient care.
Our Surgical Expertise
Our Publications Visit PubMed for journal articles from our gynecologic cancer experts 
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If ovarian cancer is suspected, excellent surgical care is required from the onset of treatment.
Debulking
A procedure known as debulking is often used to treat women with ovarian cancer. During the debulking procedure, surgeons remove as much of the visible tumor as possible using the most sophisticated surgical tools and techniques available. Eighty percent of patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering are "optimally," or successfully, debulked, meaning that residual tumor remaining after surgery is very small (1 centimeter or less).1
Minimally Invasive Surgery
Our gynecologic surgeons frequently use minimally invasive surgical techniques to treat women with ovarian cancer. For cancers that appear to be confined to the ovary, our surgeons have led the way in adopting less-invasive techniques such as laparoscopic surgery. In this procedure, the surgeon, guided by a thin, lighted tube with a camera at its tip, operates through tiny surgical "ports" (small tubes put in the body) using specially designed surgical instruments. These procedures can be used to biopsy, stage (determine the extent of the tumor), and also remove visible portions of cancer.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering surgeons have found that staging early-stage ovarian cancer with minimally invasive surgery is equally effective and accurate as staging during open surgery.2
Innovative Chemotherapy Treatments
Our Clinical Trials Find out about new research studies for ovarian cancer
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Intraperitoneal (IP) chemotherapy, also known as intra-abdominal chemotherapy, delivers chemotherapy drugs directly into the abdomen through a surgically implanted catheter. Having pioneered the first clinical trials that evaluated IP chemotherapy in the late 1980s, Memorial Sloan-Kettering remains one of the most experienced centers to offer IP chemotherapy.
We have innovative treatment programs for patients just beginning treatment and for those with advanced disease. Memorial Sloan-Kettering's treatment program involves the integration of new drugs, such as bevacizumab, into the traditional carboplatin/paclitaxel chemotherapy regimen, with the goal of improving treatment outcome.
Follow-Up Care
At the end of initial treatment for ovarian cancer, many patients will appear to be disease free, but the risk of recurrence is often high. When a patient is in remission (meaning that there is a decrease in or disappearance of signs and symptoms of cancer), we offer a series of investigational therapies, which are called consolidation, or maintenance, therapies. These therapies can include IP chemotherapy treatment (if it has not already been given as a part of the original therapy), non-cytotoxic chemotherapy, and immunologic approaches.
Whenever possible, we try to minimize the side effects of treatment. For example, to evaluate the efficacy of treatment, we perform a "second-look surgery" through laparoscopy instead of traditional open abdominal surgery. Such minimally invasive surgical approaches result in shorter hospital stays, a quicker recovery, and lower costs, and are as effective as conventional surgery.
For those women who experience a relapse of ovarian cancer, our investigators are testing a variety of novel approaches, including new drugs and drug combinations. Our goal is to strike a balance between effective treatment and optimal quality of life in order to minimize the symptoms related to both treatment and the disease.
Leading-Edge Research
Progress toward a better understanding of how ovarian cancer develops and how it responds to therapy will only be achieved through continued research. Memorial Sloan-Kettering has been a national center of excellence for ovarian cancer research for many years. Our Ovarian Cancer Program Project Grant has supported leading-edge investigations for more than ten years and continues to be supplemented by other research grants held by members of the Gynecologic Disease Management Team.
We also collaborate with the Gynecologic Oncology Group, a multi-institutional clinical research group supported by the National Cancer Institute, on studies that will improve both survival and quality of life for women with ovarian cancer.
In addition, Memorial Sloan-Kettering is interested in issues related to ovarian cancer screening. Individuals with family histories of breast or ovarian cancer may be at an increased risk of the disease and are invited to participate in our screening program. Patients diagnosed with early-stage ovarian cancer are likely to have a markedly improved survival than those with more advanced cases of the disease, and we are pursuing new detection methods that employ blood testing or imaging techniques to identify early cancers with a high degree of reliability.
One new detection method currently under investigation is a blood test to measure levels of a protein tumor marker known as YKL-40. Other tumor markers, such as CA-125 and CA15-3, are already being used to track the progression of ovarian cancer and its response to treatment. In a comparison study, investigators found that YKL-40 may be a novel marker for the detection of early-stage ovarian cancer, and that these protein levels in early-stage patients may also predict disease recurrence and survival.3 YKL-40 may also be a useful detection method for women at high risk and is being evaluated for use throughout the course of treatment.4
Future studies are being planned to learn more about the ability of YKL-40 levels to predict which tumors are responding to treatment and which are most likely to return.
1 D. S. Chi, C. C. Franklin, D. A. Levine, F. Akselrod, P. Sabbatini, W. R. Jarnagin, R. DeMatteo, E. A. Poynor, N. R. Abu-Rustum, and R. R. Barakat, Improved optimal cytoreduction rates for stages IIIC and IV epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube, and primary peritoneal cancer: A change in surgical approach, Gynecologic Oncology 94(3), 2004: 650-4. [PubMed Abstract]
See also: D. S. Chi, E. L. Eisenhauer, Y. Sonoda, N. R. Abu-Rustum, M. L. Gemignani, D. A. Levine, M. L. Hensley, P. Sabbatini, C. L. Brown, and R. R. Barakat, Improved overall survival for patients with advanced ovarian, tubal, and primary peritoneal carcinoma as a result of a change in surgical approach: A follow-up study, Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2007 ASCO Annual Meeting Proceedings Part I. 25(18S), 2007: 5530. [2007 ASCO abstract]
2 D. S. Chi, N. R. Abu-Rustum, Y. Sonoda, J. Ivy, E. Rhee, K. Moore, D. A. Levine, and R. R. Barakat, The safety and efficacy of laparoscopic surgical staging of apparent stage I ovarian and fallopian tube cancers, American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 192(5), 2005: 1614-9. [PubMed Abstract]
3 J. Dupont, M. K. Tanwar, H. T. Thaler, M. Fleisher, N. Kauff, M. L. Hensley, P. Sabbatini, S. Anderson, C. Aghajanian, E. C. Holland, and D. R. Spriggs, Early detection and prognosis of ovarian cancer using serum YKL-40, Journal of Clinical Oncology 22(16), 2004: 3330-9. [PubMed Abstract]
4 P. Sabbatini, D. Mooney, A. Iasonos, H. Thaler, C. Aghajanian, M. Hensley, J. Konner, D. Spriggs, N. R. Abu-Rustum, and J. Dupont, Early CA-125 fluctuations in patients with recurrent ovarian cancer receiving chemotherapy, International Journal of Gynecological Cancer 17(3), 2007: 589-94. [PubMed Abstract]
Last Updated: Jan. 2, 2008
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