Currently, surgery-oriented treatment plays a major role in the treatment of ovarian cancer patients. But 5-year survival rate of patients is still around 30%. One of the main reasons for the Iow survival rate is the drug resistance of tumor cells against chemotherapy.1,2 The function of antiapoptosis in the course of initiation and progress of cancer has a close relationship with drug resistance of tumor cells. Survivin is a new discovered anti-apoptosis gene, its expression levels correlating with more aggressive disease and poor clinical outcome in many of these tumors. It has been reported that survivin is expressed during fetal development and in cancer tissues.3 Furthermore,survivin overexpression, by disrupting the balance between cell proliferation/differentiation and apoptosis, may relate with the resistance to a variety of apoptotic stimuli, including chemotherapy.4,5 We designed antisense oligonucleotides of survivin to treat the drug-resistant human ovarian carcinoma cell line COC1/DDP, and studied its effects on inducing COC1/DDP apoptosis. The purpose of this study was to find a novel approach to improve the sensitivity of ovarian carcinoma chemotherapy.