For women with ovarian cancer, there is a high rate of mortality, in part due to the ease of cancer cell spreading, or metastasis, in the abdominal cavity. Current treatments can be expensive and have proven to be ineffective against long-term survival in these patients. It's one of the reasons many researchers have sought to identify natural products and synthesized compounds with pharmacological effects against cancer cells.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center recently published a study in the journal Cancers uncovering the effects that a natural product has on ovarian cancer metastasis. Hilary Kenny, Ph.D., and Ernst Lengyel, MD, Ph.D., lead the Ovarian Cancer Research Laboratory in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The lab's expertise in ovarian cancer biology is strengthened further by collaborations formed with other research groups.

Several years ago, the ovarian cancer researchers first began working with the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS), which provided high-throughput screening (HTS) facilities. HTS allows scientists to test simultaneously how well hundreds (or even thousands) of drug compounds work against cancer cells.

"We aimed to mimic the human situation by using primary human cells to reconstruct the lining of the abdominal cavity, where ovarian cancer cells metastasize," Kenny said.

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