Ovarian Cancer

Dr Marcia Hall, CTRT Chair

Lead Clinician for Research and Development at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre

Dr Marcial Hall educated at Cheltenham Ladies College (St Austins 1975-81).  Trained in medicine at Guy’s Hospital Medical School – q1986.  Completed PhD at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now CRUK) working on cyclins and kinases.

Consultant in medical oncology Mount Vernon Cancer Centre with the main interest in gynaecological cancers but interest in clinical research occasionally leads to different tumour types. PI of many clinical trials at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre in gynaecological cancers and Chief Investigator, nationally of the CeNtuRIOn, CoRINth, and RaNGO trials. In 2018 she joined translational oncology at Brunel University where explores the role of circulating cancer-associated cells in cancers, mostly gynaecological.

Current Research

The Cancer Treatment and Research Trust enable Mount Vernon Cancer Centre staff to enter a significantly larger proportion of patients with gynaecological cancers into many different clinical trials than all but a few centres in Europe. Generous donations have funded a dedicated group of research nurses, research fellows doctors and trials data managers.

PARP inhibitor and doublet immunotherapy treatment

Ovarian cancer patients with BRCA mutations and some others, eg. with platinum-sensitive relapsed disease, can benefit from drugs called PARP inhibitors that selectively prevent their cancer cells from recovering from agents that damage their DNA.

Professor Hall is currently the Chief Investigator of a trial exploring the value of combining a PARP inhibitor with doublet immunotherapy to see if more patients might benefit from the combination rather than rucaparib or immunotherapy alone – CeNtuRIOn trial.

“It is very exciting to see these drugs in routine practice.” – Dr Marcia Hall

The researchers funded by the CTRT have spent a lot of time looking after patients receiving PARP inhibitors such as olaparib, niraparib and rucaparib since the earliest trials opened.  With the funding, in 2021 the additional recruitment will be open to over 200 randomised patients to continue the study.

Rare Neoplasms of Gynaecological Origin (RaNGO)

Only around 18% of all cancers develop in the female reproductive organs, which are very rare accounting for 5-500 cases per rare cancer a year in the UK.

“This means that we cannot be certain that we manage patients quite as well as more common cancers because we only have anecdotal experiences to refer to, rather than large scale trials which are more accurate.”  – Dr Marcia Hall

Entirely supported by CTRT, RaNGO run from Mount Vernon Cancer Centre and is an anonymised national registry of patients with these very rare cancers, including details about how they are currently treated and the outcomes.

“This registry will enable us to pool our experiences of treating patients with the same diagnosis improving our knowledge base. This should help us develop better treatment options for these patients as well as help us to develop more accurate information sheets for patients affected by this condition and their families in the future.” – Dr Marcia Hall

RaNGO also facilitates the donation of tissue, obtained from any operations or biopsies, from these patients, for future scientific research.  The UK gynaecological cancer community is very supportive of this initiative and already more than half of the cancer centres which treat these cancers have opened the RaNGO study to add their cases.

Many other countries have similar initiatives underway and ultimately we will use the RaNGO results to collaborate with international colleagues.

The next step for this project is to explore the easiest way to be able to open clinical trials of novel treatments, in a timely manner for these small groups of patients.

The Team

The 10-12-person research team work closely with Professor Marcia Hall, Dr Ignacio Vazquez and the specialist registrar to look after these patients and collect all the important data so new treatments can be closely analysed and hopefully introduced into routine practice. The team at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre works closely with many other colleagues in gynaecological oncology across the UK to ensure we offer our patients access to novel therapies for their gynaecological cancer.