Adaptive therapy achieves long-term control of chemotherapy resistance in high grade ovarian cancer

Drug resistance in metastatic cancer leads to poor patient outcomes. Adaptive Therapy (AT) aims to mitigate this by exploiting the fitness costs incurred by drug-resistant cells in the absence of drugs. The study demonstrates that fitness costs in chemotherapy-resistant ovarian cancer lead to resistant population decline and apoptosis under low-resource conditions. Carboplatin AT extended the survival of mice with ovarian cancer, and analysis of patient samples indicated a strong correlation between resistant cell population size (inferred using cell-free DNA) and disease burden. These findings support a multicenter phase 2 trial evaluating AT in ovarian cancer.

Helen Hockings, Eszter Lakatos, Weini Huang, Maximilian Mossner, Mohammed Ateeb Khan, Stephen Metcalf, Francesco Nicolini, Kane Smith, Ann-Marie Baker, Trevor A Graham, Michelle Lockley