Bevacizumab and Improvement of PFS in Ovarian Cancer

Sean C. Dowdy, MD, professor, chair, Division of Gynecologic Surgery, co-leader, Women’s Cancer Program, Mayo Clinic, discusses bevacizumab and improvement of progression-free survival (PFS) for patients with the mesenchymal molecular subtype of ovarian cancer.

Clinical Pearls:

• ICON7, a previous study, demonstrated that the addition of bevacizumab to carboplatin and paclitaxel improves progression-free survival (PFS), but not overall survival (OS) in first-line treatment of ovarian cancer
• The goal of this analysis was to determine if response to bevacizumab was associated with the molecular classification as described by The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project.
• The analysis identified four groups of tumors according to TCGA: differentiated, immunoreactive, mesenchymal and proliferative.
• The proliferative and mesenchymal groups had a better response to bevacizumab and showed an improvement in PFS compared to the two other molecular subtypes.