Expression data from young and senescence ovarian cancer cells from patients with or without chemotherapy

There is a paradigm that cancer cells are immortal, which indicates that they have an ability to bypass cellular senescence. This is often linked with an expression of telomerase which restores the telomeric DNA. Cellular senescence may be induced in cancer cells by their exposure to clinically relevant doses of ionizing radiation (radiotherapy) and chemotherapy. It means that even though cancer cells avoided senescence in the course of their immortalization, they preserved intact molecular effectory pathways leading to senescence under some therapy-related conditions. Interestingly, it has repeatedly been described that tumors from patients who had no received any form of therapy also contain a fraction of cells bearing morphological and biochemical signature of senescence. Taking this into account, the goal of our project was to examine the presence of spontaneously senescent ovarian cancer cells in vivo and in vitro, and to describe molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. There were three experimental groups with three controls and three experimental samples in each.