I am pleased to let you know that I have been joined by Senator Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) in introducing legislation to fund research and prevention efforts in the fight against ovarian cancer.  Ovarian cancer ranks fifth in cancer deaths among women.  One of the reasons that it is so deadly is because there is no effective screening test for ovarian cancer currently available.  It is also difficult to diagnose because its symptoms are easily confused with those of other diseases.

Currently only 20 percent of ovarian cancer cases in the United States are diagnosed at early stage of the disease, when it is most treatable.  As evidence of this, when detection occurs before the cancer has spread beyond the ovaries, more than 93 percent of women survive longer than five years.  When diagnosed in the advanced stages, however, the chance of five-year survival drops to about 30 percent.

Our bill, the Ovarian Cancer Biomarker Research Act of 2008, seeks to change this.  It would create a program to encourage research on ovarian cancer and to identify biomarkers and other ways to determine the presence and extent of ovarian cancer.  It also encourages research into therapies to treat the disease and establishes a national clinical trial to enroll at-risk women in a study to determine the effectiveness of ovarian cancer biomarkers.

I am excited about the health changes that are possible with this legislation and you can count on me to work for its passage.

Sincerely,

Barbara Boxer
United States Senator