Senescence Detection in Ovarian Cancer

The study was based on tumors obtained from 60 patients with serous ovarian cancer (stage III or IV according to the criteria of the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics). One half of them were chemotherapy-naïve whereas the other half received CPT and PCT prior cytoreduction [32 (link)]. The patients were between 36 and 88 years old. The tumors were fixed in 4% formalin, embedded in paraffin, and cut into 3 μm sections. Deparaffinization, rehydration and epitope retrieval were performed using Envision Flex Target Retrieval Solution (Dako, Glostrup, Denmark). The cancerous nature of the tissues was identified using standard H + E staining by a pathomorphologist. Cytochemical detection of senescence-associated β-galactosidase (SA-β-Gal) was conducted following methodology described by Dimri et al. [33 (link)] and planimetric analyses of a green-stained area reflecting the presence of SA-β-Gal-positive cancer cells were performed as described in [10 (link)].