Expression of MAGE in Ovarian Tumor

Objective: Chemotherapy of ovarian cancer has a main role in the post-surgical treatment of ovarian cancer. However, relapsing patients are usually resistant to an additional chemotherapy. The development of immunotherapy is therefore needed to offer other preventive treatment modalities of ovarian cancer. MAGE encoding tumor-rejection antigens recognized by cytotoxic T lymphocytes are expressed at the mRNA level in various malignant tumors. We investigated the possibility of immunotherapy of ovarian cancer of MAGE expression. Methods: To explore this possibility in ovarian tumors, we investigated the expression of MAGE 1-6 in 44 surgical samples of neoplastic and non-neoplastic tissues from ovaries using a MAGE 1-6 common primer by the nested reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (nested RT-PCR) and DNA sequencing after subcloning of PCR products. The material consisted of 5 cases of normal ovaries, 6 cases of non- neoplastic diseases (3 follicular cysts, 2 endometrioses, and 1 tuboovarian abscess), and 8 cases of benign serous, 4 cases of mucinous cystic tumor, 9 teratomas, and 4 cases of malignant serous tumor, 1 case of mucinous tumor, 2 cases of undifferentiated carcinoma, 2 borderline serous and 3 mucinous tumor. Results: MAGE were expressed in 23% of benign ovarian tumors (5/21 cases). In contrast, no expression of these genes was observed in any of the 11 samples of normal and non-neoplastic ovarian tissues. All (92%) malignant tumors except one case of borderline malignant mucinous tumor showed MAGE 1-6 m RNA expression (P