British scientists have made a significant breakthrough in the treatment of ovarian cancer by discovering a way to reverse the resistance to drugs that denies thousands of women patients each year a chance of survival.

Ovarian Cancer is a common disease and one of the hardest to treat. Around 70 per cent of patients cannot be cured because they develop resistance to the chemotherapy which targets the malignant cells.

Professor Hani Gabra and his team at the Hammersmith Hospital in west London have discovered four major gene pathways that could reverse the resistance. This opens up the prospect of developing a drug to block these pathways and allow the chemotherapy to carry on working. The drugs in question, cisplatin and carboplatin - also known as platinum chemotherapy - are given as injections after surgery.

The hope is that a treatment can be developed which would allow the majority of women, in whom the disease has spread, to carry on living with it as a ‘chronic’ condition, which cannot be cured but can be treated.

Gabra, a professor of medical oncology and head of the West London Gynecological Cancer Centre, said: ‘The discovery could mean we change the outlook for patients suffering from ovarian cancer and potentially other cancers too. This really is a significant advance.’