Overview
What It Is
This dataset contains summary data visualizations and clinical data from 585 ovarian serous cystadenocarcinomas from 585 patients. The data was gathered as part of the PanCancer Atlas initiative, which aims to answer overarching questions about cancer by examining the full set of tumors characterized in the TCGA dataset.
What Data Types Are Included
The clinical data includes mutation count, information about mutated genes, patient demographics, disease status, tumor typing, and chromosomal gain or loss. The dataset also includes copy-number segment data downloadable as .seg files and viewable via the Integrative Genomics Viewer (IGV).
More broadly, the PanCancer Atlas harmonization pipeline standardized the following data types across all 33 TCGA cancer types, including ovarian.
Key Genomic Features of the TCGA Ovarian Dataset
The HGSOC-specific biology well-documented in this dataset includes:
- TP53 mutation in ~96% of cases — near-universal, making it essentially a defining feature rather than a discriminating biomarker
- Widespread copy-number alterations — consistent with the early, truncal chromosomal instability seen in the McPherson WGD paper
- BRCA1/2 germline and somatic alterations in ~20% of cases
- Low somatic mutation rate overall outside of CNA — contrasting sharply with endometrial cancer
- Four molecular subtypes defined by the original TCGA ovarian paper: immunoreactive, differentiated, proliferative, and mesenchymal
PanCancer Atlas Context
The PanCancer Atlas initiative compares 33 tumor types profiled by TCGA, investigating shared cell-of-origin patterns, oncogenic processes, and signaling pathways across cancers. The 2018 harmonization represented a major reprocessing effort — applying uniform computational pipelines across all cancer types to enable robust cross-cancer comparisons, which is what distinguishes _pan_can_atlas_2018 from earlier TCGA ovarian releases on cBioPortal.