Sara Bouberhan, MD

Massachusetts General Hospital

Academic Titles

Instructor, Medicine, Harvard Medical School

Research Program Affiliation

Member, Gynecologic Cancers

Member, Developmental Therapeutics

Research Abstract

One of the primary challenges in the management of advanced ovarian cancer is the inability to identify which patients have been cured from front-line treatment. Many patients have already been cured of their disease, but still receive unnecessary maintenance treatment. Many others do not benefit from a given maintenance strategy and receive ineffective treatment which only delivers toxicity. Clinicians do not yet have a tool to guide decision making with more precision. I am working with a group of researchers to develop an ovarian cancer liquid biopsy, which could be applied to this clinical context. A cost-efficient and highly sensitive assay also has the potential to identify mutations predictive of treatment response or resistance, and future research using expanded gene panels could address this possibility.