[Prognostic and predictive factors in epithelial ovarian cancer]

Even if prognosis of epithelial ovarian cancer remains very bad, survival and response to treatment are variable according to the patients. Determination of new prognostic markers helps us to adapt therapeutics for each patient and is necessary for the elaboration and the interpretation of clinical research studies. Many prognostic factors related to the tumor, the patient or the treatment, have been evaluated. The goal of this work is to review these parameters. So far, the most powerful variables are volume of residual disease after cytoreductive surgery, FIGO tumor stage, histologic type and grade of differentiation. The progress and accessibility to novel technologies applied to biology will make possible in the future the assessment of new prognostic profiles-based on genetic and/or proteomic tumor characteristics. The future also relies on the identification of predictive factors of response to treatment, but force is to note that on the last hundred publications testing predictive factors (p53, HER2, Topo-2-alpha, BRCA...), none have modified today our clinical practices.