For the past few years we’ve been working with Charlie Gourley, Patricia Roxburgh, Ailith Ewing and others to better understand high grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) – and this has culminated in a manuscript now posted online. Ailith has also written a thread explaining this work. There aren’t enough good treatment options for women who develop these tumours and that’s partly because we don’t yet understand how they evolve during the course of the disease. We’ve assembled a large whole genome sequencing dataset, including 324 of these tumours, gaining a number of new insights into how they emerge and grow, and opening new avenues to better treatments. HGSOC is also a tumour type that shows extreme structural instability, resulting in chaotic new rearrangements of the human genome. We hope that our study also provides a blueprint to study other poorly studied cancers showing high structural diversity.
The Semple Lab 