Although up to 10% of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer (OC) have genetic predisposition to the cancer, the remaining 90% are sporadic cases. The latter women are likely to have some genetic factors that will predispose them to the disease but until recently there was very little evidence for this.

Currently, CA125 is the only marker used for detecting ovarian cancer early and monitoring its course. The effort through UKOPS has been to identify novel markers that could aid CA125.

Symptoms for ovarian cancer are vague and non-specific and therefore it is difficult to identify the women who have ovarian cancer in primary care. UKOPS is exploring which symptoms or medical complaints are common in women with ovarian cancer when compared to women who do not have the disease.

The study was set up to:

1. Be at the forefront of precision medicine through advancing our understanding of risk factors and genetic susceptibility to OC to answer the question ‘Why do some women develop ovarian cancer and not others?”
2. As part of the Ovarian Tumour Tissue Analysis (OTTA) consortium to develop and validate novel immunohistochemistry biomarkers and algorithms for prognosis and histological subtype classification of epithelial OC
3. Discovery and validation of novel biomarkers for early detection and differential diagnosis of OC
4. Further understanding of symptoms for ovarian cancer, time to diagnosis and impact on early detection/survival using questionnaire, telephone interviews and GP notes symptom diary with unique data collection prior to diagnosis.

UKOPS is a multi-centre case control cohort, one of the largest studies to contribute to the international Ovarian Cancer Association Consortium (OCAC) which is at the forefront of advancing our understanding of risk factors and genetic susceptibility to ovarian cancer as well as prognostic markers.