Most uterine cancers have excellent five-year survival rates—up to 95% for localized cancer. Serous uterine cancer is an exception, with five-year survival rates of 35% to 50% for stage 1 or 2 cancer. Now, researchers at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center say that in the course of developing a new model for ovarian cancer , they've developed additional evidence that serous uterine cancer possibly begins in the fallopian tubes, not the uterus.
In other words, it's already metastatic by the time that it's found in the uterus. The paper describing this evidence and the new ovarian cancer model was published this month in Cancer Research Communications . Senior author Joe Delaney, Ph.
D., attributed the finding to the most elemental building block of science: curiosity. As he and his team worked to develop a sorely needed model of ovarian cancer, they were pleased to see the model working as expected, with cancer signals showing up on the fallopian tubes and ovaries—but taken aback to also see these signals in the uterus.
"We said, 'Hey, wait a minute. I see this signal over in the uterus—specifically on the uterine epithelial cells—which definitely should not have these cancer signals coming from it.' Particularly because this driver is only expressed on the fallopian tube itself, we shouldn't be having expression on these uterine cells," he said.
The team wasn't surprised to see cancer signals on the fallopian tubes because that's where they'd sent the oncogene—a gene that pr.
