Researchers from the Graduate School of Medicine in Nagoya, Japan have uncovered a possible reason why mucinous and clear cell cancers of the ovary do not respond as well to Taxol than the more common serous type of ovarian cancer.

Taxol is generally used as one of the first drugs against all epithelial ovarian cancers and works by attaching to something deep inside the cell called tubulin, stabilizing it and preventing cancer cells from dividing. However how much of specific types of tubulin are present within the cell affects chemo-sensitivity to Taxol.

The researchers from Nagoya found that class III beta-tubulin is expressed in higher amounts in clear cell and mucinous ovarian cancers, intermediate amounts in endometrioid ovarian cancer, and in much lower amounts in the more common serous ovarian cancers. This corresponded to how well each of the cancer types responded to Taxol in their series of patients.

So, the message is that not all epithelial ovarian cancers are the same and research is underway to attack the differences between them. Although there are contrary thoughts, and until we have better solutions, the best initial treatment for mucinous and clear cell ovarian cancers remains Taxol and Carboplat.

If you have one of these more aggressive ovarian cancers, monitoring for any evidence of progression may need to be more frequent in order to determine resistance as early as possible. The details of this you should discuss with your physician. The prognosis in this situation is not good, but sometimes chemo might at least be slowing cancer growth down. On the other hand, knowing something is not working gives you the option to try another treatment plan rather than continuing with ineffective chemotherapy and tolerating side effects which you might be able to avoid.