Effect of Prolactin receptor antagonist in treatment of ovarian cancer

Understanding of hormone actions and hormone sensitivity has lead to successful cancer treatments, where breast and prostate cancer are routinely treated with agents interfering with hormones. Other types of cancers respond to treatments targeting growth factors e.g. EGF and PDGF and both of these factors exert actions on cells that change regulatory cell signals. The cancer to be investigated in this study (ovarian cancer) is not regarded to be hormone responsive tumor in a classical sense but may use local production of PRL to create signals leading to tumor survival (eg. growth factors). The recent finding of local PRL production in tumors motivates the present investigation as do our preliminary finding that CMV can activate local PRL production. A viral participation in tumorigenesis has been demonstrated in some cases but how latent viral infections, like CMV, affects the host genome and tumor growth has not been well investigated. The project will be carried out as a collaboration with in-house experts on the subject (Drs Norstedt , Al-Bahri and Al-Zadjali) and experts in other countries including the US and Sweden. Together we believe that we have a unique opportunity to advance this research field using different methodologies including IHC , cell based assays and in vivo studies.