Women-founded company partners with University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus to develop, test first-of-its-kind ovarian cancer detection test

Inside the Reproductive Sciences Lab at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, researchers are on the cutting edge to detect and prevent ovarian cancer.

"This is what I've dedicated my career to," said Dr. Kian Behbahkt, a gynecological oncologist and cancer researcher with CU.

Behbahkt has made it his life's mission to put an end to the deadly disease that affects one in 72 women. He is now a revolutionary step closer.

"We have the ability to detect ovarian cancer at a very, very, very early stage," he said.

It's thanks, in large part, to AOA Diagnostics, a women-founded Denver-based lab that CBS Colorado first visited in March 2024. AOA has developed a first-of-its-kind early detection blood test for ovarian cancer, once of the deadliest cancers in women because there are essentially no screening tools to catch it early.

"It's often detected too late," said AOA co-founder Anna Jeter. "It has some of the worst five-year survival metrics of all cancers. It's very important that we're looking for solutions."

To put their test to the test, however, AOA needed access to real-world patients. So, they partnered with the Anschutz Medical Campus to utilize its many samples from women with ovarian cancer.

"We have been able to do the research significantly faster," Jeter said. "In the last year alone, we've already been able to do development and analyze 500 samples…for our test for early detection of ovarian cancer."

And it's proving to be a success.

"We were able to profile these 500 women to understand specifically their lipid profiles, their protein profiles, their metabolic profiles to understand what is driving early stage disease and how to be to able to differentiate that from those women who are healthy or those women who have benign conditions," Jeter explained.

Behbahkt said AOA's early detection tool is like finding smoke before the fire.

"Not only can they see the smoke, they can actually pick out components of that smoke well before anything that looks like smoke is seen," he said. "This is exciting because it will translate into lives saved and women don't die from this horrible disease."

Of course, as with any medical research, it will take more time, funding, and studies before the groundbreaking tool can truly transform women's health. But researchers are hopeful they will one day finally be able to put an end to ovarian cancer."

"Really the proof in the pudding, if you will, will be that there will be no ovarian cancer in five years, and then I'll be out of a job, and I'll be happy," Behbahkt said with a smile.

Jeter said AOA's partnership with CU will be "long-lasting" and they plan to connect with other research facilities at universities around the world to further develop their early detection tool.