Outstanding female cancer research paper awards of the 2016 Taiwan Association of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Hsu Chien-Tien Cancer Foundation

Aberrant sialylation in ovarian cancers

Sialylation (the covalent addition of sialic acid to the terminal end of glycoproteins or glycans), tightly regulated cell- and microenvironment-specific process and orchestrated by sialyltransferases and sialidases (neuraminidases) family, is one of the posttranslational modifications, which plays an important biological role in the maintenance of normal physiology and involves many pathological dysfunctions. Glycans have roles in all the cancer hallmarks, referring to capabilities acquired during all steps of cancer development to initiate malignant transformation (a driver of a malignant genotype), enable cancer cells to survive, proliferate, and metastasize (a consequence of a malignant phenotype), which includes sustaining proliferative signaling, evading growth suppressor, resisting cell apoptosis, enabling replicative immortality, inducing angiogenesis, reprogramming of energy metabolism, evading tumor destruction, accumulating inflammatory microenvironment, and activating invasion and accelerating metastases. Regarding the important role of altered sialylation of cancers, further knowledge about the initiation and the consequences of altered sialylation pattern in tumor cells is needed, because all may offer a better chance for developing novel therapeutic strategy. In this review, we would like to update alteration of sialylation in ovarian cancers.

Risks of female genital tract related cancers (gynecological cancers) or breast cancer in women with and without chronic kidney disease: A population-based cohort study in Taiwan

This article aims to test the hypothesis that the risk of female genital tract related cancer (gynecological cancer: GC) or breast cancer (BC) of women with chronic kidney disease (CKD) might be different from that of those women without CKD.A nationwide 17-year historic cohort study using the National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) of Taiwan and the Registry for Catastrophic Illness Patients was conducted. A total of 3045 women with a diagnosis of CKD from 1996 to 2013 and 3045 multivariable-matched controls (1:1) were selected. We used Cox regression, and computed hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) to determine the risk of GC or BC in women.The GC incidence rates (IRs, per 10,000 person-years) of the CKD and non-CKD women were 11.02 and 19.09, respectively, contributing to a significantly decreased risk of GCs (crude HR 0.57, 95% CI 0.39-0.81; adjusted HR 0.44, 95% CI 0.30-0.65) in the CKD women. The GC IR was relatively constant in the CKD women among the different age categories (IR ranged from 8.10 to 12.29). On contrast, the non-CKD women had a progressive and continuous increase of GC IR in the advanced age, which was more apparent at age ≥50 years (IR 17.16 for 50-59; IR 23.05 for 60-69; and IR 31.62 for ≥70, respectively), contributing to the lower risk of GC in the CKD women than that in the non-CKD women. There was no difference of BC incidence between women with and without CKD.The findings of the lower risk of GCs in the CKD women in Taiwan are worthy of further evaluation.