[Gene therapy and ovarian cancer: update of clinical trials]

Ovarian cancer is the first leading cause of death from gynecologic cancer. Advances in therapy are needed to obtain complete response after surgery and/or chemotherapy. Gene therapy is a new alternative therapeutic approach. 380 gene therapy clinical trials (3173 patients) are going to be assessed. 63% of these trials concern therapy of cancer. 16 gene therapy clinical trails are applied to ovarian cancer. These 16 clinical trials assess different treatment strategies: Mutation compensation by replacement of an altered tumor suppressor gene (p53, BRCA1); Molecular chemotherapy by transfer of a suicide gene (HSV-tk gene); Antitumoral immunotherapy by cytokine gene transfer (IL2, IL12); Oncogene inhibition (erb-B2 gene); Multi Drug Resistance gene transfer. A knowledge of basis concepts of gene transfer strategies, is needed to understand these different treatment strategies. Thus, the goals of this review are, first, to provide the basis concepts of gene transfer strategies to the obstetrician-gynecologist and second, to submit recent gene therapy clinical trials about ovarian cancer.