German Cancer Aid funds translational research project on ovarian cancer evolution

Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecological cancer. Although treatment options have improved in recent years, most patients with advanced disease ultimately experience a recurrence. A key challenge is that ovarian cancer can spread and progress during a clinically silent phase, long before this progression becomes apparent in routine clinical practice. Therefore, a better understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of ovarian cancer's temporal and spatial development is essential to improve our understanding of disease progression and to identify new targets for future personalized therapies.

This is precisely the point where the new translational research project, which is funded by the German Cancer Aid Foundation, starts. The project is realized by a close interdisciplinary collaboration between the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics and the Institute of Medical Informatics and Biometry. It builds on current research from Dresden and follows a translational approach to investigate the evolution of ovarian cancer. Using genomic analyses of anatomically mapped primary tumors and metastases, the clonal architecture of ovarian cancer in individual patients will be reconstructed and mutation-specific patterns of the tumor clones will be identified. By combining these data with longitudinally collected blood samples, the evolutionary developmental trajectories of recurrence-associated tumor clones will be traced over time, and potential target structures for future personalized therapies will be identified.

The project, entitled “Exploring the evolution of ovarian cancer across spatiotemporal heterogeneity: from theoretical frameworks to clinical translation,” is led by Prof. Dr. Jan Dominik Kuhlmann at the Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Laboratory for Translational Gynecological Oncology, together with PD Dr. Michael Seifert at the Institute of Medical Informatics and Biometry, research group Medical Bioinformatics. The project is funded by the German Cancer Aid Foundation with more than €381,000 over a period of three years starting in April 2026.