Background: Ovarian cancer is the second most common gynecologic malignancy, accounting for approximately 220,000 deaths annually worldwide. Despite radical surgery and initial high response rates to platinum- and taxane-based chemotherapy, most patients experience a relapse, with a median progression-free survival of only 18 months. Overall survival is approximately 30% at 5 years from the diagnosis. In comparison, patients out from breast cancer are more than 80 % after ten years from the disease discovery. In spite of a large number of published fundamental and applied research, and clinical trials, novel therapies are urgently needed to improve outcomes of the ovarian cancer. The success of new drugs development in ovarian cancer will strongly depend on both fully genomic disease characterization and, then, availability of biomarkers able to identify women likely to benefit from a given new therapy.

Methods: In this review, the focus is given to describe how complex is the diseases under the simple name of ovarian cancer, in terms of cell tumor types, histotypes, subtypes, and specific gene mutation or differently expressed in the tumor with respect the healthy ovary. The first- and second-line pharmacological treatment clinically used over the last fifty years are also described. Noteworthy achievements in vitro and in vivo tested new drugs are also summarized. Recent literature related to up to date ovarian cancer knowledge, its detection by biomarkers and chemotherapy was searched from several articles on Pubmed, Google Scholar, MEDLINE and various Governmental Agencies till April 2019.

Results: The papers referenced by this review allow a deep analysis of status of the art in the classification of the several types of ovarian cancer, the present knowledge of diagnosis based on biomarkers and imaging techniques, and the therapies developed over the past five decades.

Conclusion: This review aims at stimulating more multi-disciplinary efforts to identify a panel of novel and more specific biomarkers to be used to screen patients for a very early diagnosis, to have prognosis and therapy efficacy indications. The desired final goal would be to have available tools allowing to reduce the recurrence rate, increase both the disease progression free interval and of course the overall survival at five years from the diagnosis that today is still very low.

背景：卵巢癌是第二大最常见的妇科恶性肿瘤，占全世界每年约22万例死亡。尽管进行了根治性手术并且对基于铂和紫杉烷的化学疗法最初反应率很高，但大多数患者仍会复发，中位无进展生存期仅为18个月。诊断后5年的总生存率约为30％。相比之下，距疾病发现十年后，乳腺癌患者的比例已超过80％。尽管有大量已发表的基础和应用研究以及临床试验，但仍迫切需要新颖的疗法来改善卵巢癌的预后。卵巢癌新药开发的成功将在很大程度上取决于完全基因组疾病的表征，然后，

方法：在这篇综述中，重点是从细胞肿瘤类型，组织类型，亚型，特异性基因突变或相对于健康人在肿瘤中的不同表达来描述以卵巢癌简称的疾病的复杂性。子房。还介绍了最近五十年来临床使用的一线和二线药理治疗。还总结了在体外和体内测试的新药方面的显著成就。截至2019年4月，在Pubmed，Google Scholar，MEDLINE和各种政府机构的几篇文章中搜索了有关最新卵巢癌知识，其通过生物标志物和化学疗法检测的最新文献。

结果：这篇综述所引用的论文对几种类型的卵巢癌的分类，基于生物标志物和成像技术的诊断知识以及过去五年来开发的治疗方法进行了深入的分析。

结论：这篇综述旨在激发更多的多学科努力，以鉴定一组新的和更具体的生物标志物，以用于筛查患者的早期诊断，具有预后和治疗功效的指征。期望的最终目标将是拥有可用的工具，这些工具可以降低复发率，增加疾病无进展间隔，当然也可以从诊断得出当前的五年后五年内提高总体生存率。