Primary and secondary ovarian tumors

The distinction between primary and secondary ovarian tumors may be challenging for pathologists. We performed transcriptomic analysis in order to discriminate between primary ovarian tumors and ovarian metastases after primary breast cancer. We performed genomic analysis on tumor paired samples (breast/ovary) in order to know if genomic profiles could help for the discrimination of primary ovarian tumors and ovarian metastases after primary breast cancer. 1) Transcriptomic profiling: The transcriptomes of ovarian carcinomas from patients with previous history of breast cancer, and for which the primary or secondary status was uncertain, were analyzed using Affymetrix U133plus2 Arrays. A hierarchical clustering of these samples was performed, combined with a dataset of well-identified primary and secondary ovarian tumors. 2) Genomic profiling: Sixteen paired breast-ovary tumors from patients with a former dignosis of breast cancer were collected. The genomic profiles of paired tumors were analyzed using Affymetrix 50k_Xba or SNP6 arrays.