Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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Hello everyone.
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My name is eric paul Davies and this is
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my project about ovarian cancer and immunotherapy outlooks.
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Now before we dive into this,
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let's overview some basic anatomy and physiology.
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The size of one over is approximately two cm wide and one cm thick.
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The shape of an ovary is an almond shape as you can see to the left
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and the location of each ovary
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is on either side of the uterus.
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The function of the ovaries as you can imagine,
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is to produce sex hormones and further develop the ovum.
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A little information about ovarian cancer.
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Ovarian cancer accounts for 3-4% of the cancer in all women.
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Ovarian cancer is the second most common
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gynecologic malignancy
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meaning that often times gynecologists oversee
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ovarian cancer signs and symptoms since they are so hard to detect.
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In the year 2019 an estimated 44,000 new ovarian cancer cases were
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diagnosed in the US and 20,000 patients that come to the disease.
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Unfortunately
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In general ovarian cancer occurs postmenopausal
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with women between 65-74 years old,
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having the highest incident rate.
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Now
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You may be wondering why this interested me
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as someone who lost their grandmother in 2009 to ovarian cancer,
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I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth tourist this disease.
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But as I got older I became interested as to why something that affects
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the reproductive tract had such an adverse effect on one's health
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With that being said, there are three types of ovarian cancer
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epithelial,
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which is when the tumor starts on the outside of the ovary
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germ cell,
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which is when the cancer starts in the egg cells,
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and stromal cancer,
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which is when the cancer forms and the ovarian cells that have to do with hormones.
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Epithelial ovarian cancer is the most common type of ovarian cancer.
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It develops in the epithelial tissue. As you can imagine,
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Ovarian Fallopian tube and primary periodontal cancers
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are caused by inherited mutations most of the
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time hereditary ovarian cancer makes up about 20% of all cases in ovarian cancer.
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Next is germ cell cancer.
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Germ cell cancer is a disease in which malignant
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cancer cells form in the eggs of the ovary
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signs of ovarian germ cell tumors
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are swelling in the abdomen and vaginal bleeding. After menopause,
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Luckily less than 2% of ovarian cancers are this case and nine
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out of 10 patients survive at least five years after diagnosis.
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Last but not least is stromal tumors.
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About 1% of ovarian cancers are stromal cell tumors.
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Since this is the case,
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not much information is known about these
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and not many alternatives have been discovered either
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but have no fear
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immunology might be able to solve this issue
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with the immune system becoming an increasingly important target for research,
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Host immune responses have revealed a plethora of information
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as to how we can attack these cancers.
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T cell populations,
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including NK T cells and T regulators and
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cytokines have been associated with disease outcome,
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indicating that they're increasing clinical significance.
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Having been associated with prognosis and as markers of disease progress,
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respectively. Though
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harnessing the immune system capacity in order to
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induce anti tumor response is a huge difficult
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task for us to complete.
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Now that we've mentioned, immunology
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will show how these worlds collide
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as you may recall in class, we briefly talked about cytokines
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and how they're secreted
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and they have the responses
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and induce responses on other cells.
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Aside a time seems to be heavily involved in
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immuno suppression in transforming the growth factor G G F B,
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a protein that affects proliferation, activation
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and differentiation of immune cells
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and inhibits anti tumor immune response
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in cancer cells. The production of T G FB is increased,
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which in turn increases the protea elliptic activity of cells and
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the binding to cell adhesion molecules in its intracellular matrix.
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In addition to that point
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recall, we learned about the relevance of lymphocytes in class.
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The identification of important subsets of lymphocytes
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and tumors and asides from ovarian cancers
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has led to the study of possible
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immuno modulator torrey effects of current therapies
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accompanied with chemotherapy in particular
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Paxil A two axle
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there may be a very positive effect on the
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immune response by down regulating t regs through the use
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of lymphocytes
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now,
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why is this revolutionary and relevant to immunology
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to be quite frank
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chemotherapy. Although it's very effective for most cancer treatments.
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It also comes with really, really bad side effects. Sometimes hair loss.
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Well most of the time hair lost
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radiation, rashes, diarrhea, loss of appetite and overall fatigue.
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If we're able to prevent a patient from experiencing these inconveniences,
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this is an obvious win for the medicine world.
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This advancement in cancer alternatives would place emphasis on
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the use of less intrusive techniques to cure cancer
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and rely more on natural immunological responses, such as the lymphocytes,
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or the use of t g f b to decrease, decrease the amount of t regulatory cells
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in patients.