Hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome carries significant mortality for young women if effective preventive and screening measures are not taken. Preventive salpingo-oophorectomy is currently the only method known to reduce the risk of ovarian cancer-related death. Histopathological analyses of these surgical specimens indicate that a high proportion of ovarian cancers in women at high risk and in the general population arise from the fallopian tube. This paradigm shift concerning the cell of origin for the most common subtype of ovarian cancer, high-grade serous carcinoma, has sparked a major effort within the research community to develop new and robust model systems to study the fallopian tube epithelium as the cell of origin of "ovarian" cancer. In this review, evidence supporting the fallopian tube as the origin of ovarian cancer is presented as are novel experimental model systems for studying the fallopian tube epithelium in high-risk women as well as in the general population. This review also addresses the clinical implications of the newly proposed cell of origin, the clinical questions that arise, and novel strategies for ovarian cancer prevention.
©2015 American Association for Cancer Research.