Predictive Biomarkers and Targeted Therapies in Gynecological Cancers

Abstract

Gynecological cancers are a very important group of diseases, with a persistently dismal prognosis despite the significant growth in the understanding of the molecular biology of neoplasia. Targeted therapy is currently a reality only for ovarian and cervical cancers, where angiogenesis plays a very important role, sufficient for good clinical results with the adoption of antiangiogenic therapy, especially in the combination with conventional chemotherapy. In the other fields, there is still a scarcity of predictive biomarkers for therapy, despite great understanding of biological and pathological pathways linked to development and evolution of neoplasia. This chapter focuses on the current understanding and the possible next steps on predictive biomarkers for ovarian, cervical, vulvar, vaginal, and endometrial cancers, including the next frontiers to be broken in therapeutics.