Objective This study aimed to perform an integrative genetic analysis of patients with matched serous ovarian cancer having long-term or short-term survival using formalin fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue samples.

Methods All patients with serous ovarian carcinoma who underwent surgery between 1998 and 2007 at the Department of Gynaecology, Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden were considered. From this cohort, we selected biomaterial from 2 groups of patients with long-term and short-term survival matched for age, stage, histologic grade, and outcome of surgery. Genomic DNA from FFPE sample was analyzed with SNP array and targeted next-generation sequencing of 26 genes.

Results Forty-three samples (primary tumors and metastases) from 23 patients were selected for genomic profiling, the survival in the subgroups were 134 and 36 months, respectively. We observed a tendency toward increased genomic instability in those with long-term survival with higher proportion of somatic copy number alterations (P = 0.083) and higher average ploidy (P = 0.037). TP53 mutations were found in 50% of the patients. Frequency of TP53 mutations did not differ between the survival groups (P = 0.629).

Conclusions We validated both previous genomic findings in ovarian cancer and the proposed association between increased genomic instability and better survival. These results exemplify that analysis of genomic biomarkers is feasible on archived FFPE tissue.