Research

Recent highlights




Landscape of HGSOC

Divergent trajectories to structural diversity impact patient survival in high grade serous ovarian cancer

Ewing, A., Meynert, A., Silk, R. et al. Divergent trajectories to structural diversity impact patient survival in high grade serous ovarian cancer. Nat Commun 16, 5586 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60655-y

Contributions from Jo, Kitty and Stuart.

High grade serous ovarian cancer shows extreme structural instability, resulting in chaotic new rearrangements of the entire human genome that are unique to each tumour. These rearrangements are challenging to study with current technologies, but we show that they produce discernible and recurring patterns across many patients. We hope that our study also provides a blueprint for other poorly studied cancers showing high structural diversity.

Selected publications

Hamdan A and Ewing A. ‘Unravelling the tumour genome: The evolutionary and clinical impacts of structural variants in tumourigenesis’. (2022) The Journal of Pathology, https://doi.org/10.1002/path.5901.

Gershenson D, Miller A, Brady WE, …, Ewing A,…, Gourley C. ‘Trametinib versus standard of care in patients with recurrent low-grade serous ovarian cancer (GOG 281/LOGS): an international, randomised, open-label, multicentre, phase 2/3 trial’. (2022) The Lancet. (399) (10324) 541-553.

Ewing A, Meynert A, Churchman M et al. ‘Structural Variants at the BRCA1/2 Loci are a Common Source of Homologous Repair Deficiency in High-grade Serous Ovarian Carcinoma’ (2021) Clinical Cancer Research (27) (11) 3201-3214.

Aitken SJ, Anderson CJ, Connor F, …,Ewing A,…, Taylor M. ‘Pervasive lesion segregation shapes cancer genome evolution’ (2020) Nature 583 (7815), 265-270.

Ewing A, Semple C. ‘Breaking point: the genesis and impact of structural variation in tumours’ (2018) F1000Research 7.

Phelan CM, Kuchenbaecker KB, JP Tyrer,… Pirie A … Pharoah PDP. ‘Identification of 12 new susceptibility loci for different histotypes of epithelial ovarian cancer’ (2017) Nature genetics 49 (5), 680-691.


Full list of publications on Google Scholar