Progress in microenvironment and chemoresistance of Ovarian cancer / 肿瘤

ABSTRACT

Among all gynecological tumors, ovarian cancer is the third most common cancer but the most lethal one. Currently, the standard first-line treatment for ovarian cancer is cytoreductive surgery combined with platinum and paclitaxel chemotherapy. Although the patients with ovarian cancer respond to the standard therapeutic approach and gain a high remission rate, the most patients relapse after about 2 years of complete remission, the recurrence rate is as high as 80%. The patients with recurrent epithelial ovarian cancer are resistant to almost all chemotherapy drugs due to the acquired resistance. Multidrug resistance to chemotherapy is a major cause of treatment failure. Therefore, it is an urgent problem to reveal the molecular mechanism of ovarian cancer resistance. In recent years, tumor microenvironment as an emerge concept has provided a new perspective for the study of tumorigenesis, progression and drug-resistance. Ovarian cancer is characterized by a unique tumor microenvironment that impairs immune surveillance and mediates therapy resistance. Explaining the mechanism of chemotherapy resistance from the perspective of ovarian cancer microenvironment is helpful to find effective targets reversing the drug resistance of ovarian cancer. This review first introduces the general situation of drug resistance and microenvironment of ovarian cancer, and then focuses on the research progress in the relationship of various components of ovarian cancer microenvironment with drug resistance, in order to explain the occurrence mechanisms of ovarian cancer resistance and find effective targets in the microenvironment to solve the problem of clinical drug resistance. In the end, the forward research directions in this field are prospected in this review.