Background: The oncoprotein HER-2 is over-expressed and/or has undergone gene amplification in between 20 to 30% of breast and ovarian cancers. HER-2 amplified breast cancer is associated with a poor prognosis and increased resistance to chemo-and hormonal therapy. Data supporting the transforming potential of HER-2 are irrefutable but the mechanism by which HER-2 contributes to this process is complex and a unified model of HER2-induced increased cell proliferation and survival has not emerged.

BackgroundPrevious studies have suggested that metformin may be useful for preventing and treating endometrial cancer (EC), while the results have been inconsistent. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to investigate the association between metformin use and risk and prognosis of patients with EC.MethodsPubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases were searched for observational studies evaluating the effect of metformin on EC prevention or treatment. The odds ratio (OR) was used for analyzing risks, and the hazard ratio (HR) was used for analyzing survival outcomes. A random-effects model was used for data analysis.ResultsSeven studies reported data on EC risk. The pooled results suggested that metformin was not significantly associated with a lower risk of EC [OR = 1.05, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.82–1.35, P = 0.70]. For patients with diabetes, metformin showed no advantage in reducing the EC risk compared with other interventions (OR = 0.99, 95% CI 0.78–1.26, P = 0.95). Further, seven studies were included for survival analysis. The pooled data showed that metformin could significantly improve the overall survival of patients with EC (HR = 0.61, 95% CI 0.48–0.77, P < 0.05) and reduce the risk of EC recurrence (OR = 0.50, 95% CI 0.28–0.92, P < 0.05) Finally, we noted metformin was associated with significantly improving the overall survival of EC patients among diabetes (HR = 0.47; 95%CI 0.33–0.67, P < 0.05).ConclusionsThis meta-analysis did not prove that metformin was beneficial for preventing EC. However, metformin could prolong the overall survival of patients with EC and reduce their risk of cancer relapse.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-018-4334-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

These findings suggest that GPR30 mediates the nontranscriptional effect of estrogen on the activation of PI3K/Akt pathway in endometrial cancer cells.

Abstract. Ovarian cancer is one of the most common cancers in women. Its early stages may be asymptomatic, and as a result diagnosis frequently occurrs at an advanced, often incurable, stage. The high mortality and low survival rates associated with ovarian cancer can in part be attributed to the lack of diagnostic methods allowing for early detection, yet a methodology to identify patients with early-stage ovarian cancer remains to be established. In order to investigate the frequency of antibodies against a panel of multiple carefullyselected tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) in sera from patients with ovarian cancer, and to determine the possibility and usefulness of such a panel of TAAs in the immunodiagnosis of ovarian cancer, sera from 32 ovarian cancer patients and 82 normal individuals were tested using an enzymelinked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for the presence of autoantibodies to a panel of 13 TAAs. ELISA results were also confirmed by immunoblotting analysis. The sensitivity and specificity of the multiple anti-TAA antibodies in the detection of ovarian cancer was 62.5 and 85.4%, respectively. With the successive addition of TAAs to a total of 7 antigens (survivin, p53, p16, cyclin B1, cyclin D1, cyclin A and cyclin E), there was a stepwise increase in sensitivity of up to 62.5%, and in specificity of 90.2%. With the addition of more antigens to the panel, no further increase in sensitivity was detected. This study further supports our previous hypothesis that a combination of antibodies might acquire higher sensitivity for the diagnosis of cancer, and also indicates that, in the selection of ovarian cancer-associated TAAs, some may be specific to ovarian cancer while others may not be. This emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive analysis of antibody response to selected TAAs in various disease conditions, such as ovarian cancer, in benign ovarian diseases, and in normal individuals, before conclusions can be drawn regarding their contribution to ovarian cancer.

Background: Ovarian cancer (OC) is a major malignancy affecting a large population over the world, and a biomarker that holds diagnostic potential is of critical importance. Recently, autoantibodies have been indicated as biomarkers in multiple cancer research. The current study was designed to explore the practice of using autoantibodies in diagnostic settings by the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay of sera with a panel of tumor-associated antigens (TAAs).Methods: A panel of 12 TAAs was selected to detect the corresponding autoantibodies in sera sampled from 132 OC patients as case group and 147 normal healthy individuals as the control group. The diagnostic potential of this panel was evaluated by conventional evaluation, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses, and classification tree analysis.Results: When the cutoff values were set as mean ± 2 SD for normal healthy individuals, the positive rates of antibodies to any single TAA were less than 20% both in OC and in normal healthy individuals. In a parallel screening approach, a panel of nine TAAs (p53, C-myc, p90, p62, AHSG, 14-3-3zeta, RalA, Koc, and p16), obtained optimal diagnostic performance in OC with the sensitivity of 61.4% at the 85.0% specificity. In addition, when the nine TAAs were combined with CA125, the sensitivity and specificity were improved to 94.7% and 78.2%, respectively. The ROC curve analyses showed that only the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUCs) of antibodies against C-myc, Koc, and RalA was beyond 0.6, which were 0.732, 0.668, and 0.665, respectively. The AUC of the combination was up to 0.914 (P < 0.05).Decision tree analysis showed that C-myc, HCC1.3, RalA, and CA125 held high potential in the detection of OC. The panel of nine TAAs also identified 78.8% of OC patients who had normal CA125 levels in their serum samples, indicating that elevated CA125 and anti-TAA antibodies appeared to be independent but supplementary biomarkers for diagnosing OC. Conclusions:In summary, the current study further supports that a customized TAA panel can serve as a promising and powerful tool for immunodiagnosis of OC and may be particularly useful in patients with normal CA125 levels.