Early detection and personalized treatment in oral cancer: the impact of omics approaches

Molecular Cytogenetics, Nov 2016

Background Oral cancer is one of the most common malignant lesions of the head and neck. This cancer is an aggressive and lethal disease with no significant improvements in the overall survival in the last decades. Moreover, the incidence of oral HPV-positive tumors is rising, especially in young people. This oral neoplasm develops through numerous molecular imbalances that affect key genes and signaling pathways; however, the molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis and progression of oral tumors are still to be fully determined. In order to improve the quality of life and long-term survival rate of these patients, it is vital to establish accurate biomarkers that help in the early diagnosis, prognosis and development of target treatments. Such biomarkers may possibly allow for selection of patients that will benefit from each therapy modality, helping in the optimization of intensity and sequence of the treatments in order to decrease side effects and improve survival. Conclusion In this review we discuss the current knowledge of oral cancer and the potential role of omics approaches to identify molecular biomarkers in the improvement of early diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. The pursuit to improve the quality of life and decrease mortality rates of the oral patients needs to be centralized on the identification of critical genes in oral carcinogenesis. Understanding the molecular biology of oral cancer is vital for search new therapies, being the molecular-targeted therapies the most promising treatment for these patients.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

http://www.molecularcytogenetics.org/content/pdf/s13039-016-0293-1.pdf

Early detection and personalized treatment in oral cancer: the impact of omics approaches

Ribeiro et al. Molecular Cytogenetics Early detection and personalized treatment in oral cancer: the impact of omics approaches Ilda Patrícia Ribeiro 0 1 Leonor Barroso Francisco Marques Joana Barbosa Melo 0 1 Isabel Marques Carreira 0 1 0 CIMAGO - Center of Investigation on Environment Genetics and Oncobiology - Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra , Coimbra 3000-354 , Portugal 1 Cytogenetics and Genomics Laboratory, Faculty of Medicine, University of Coimbra, Polo Ciências da Saúde , Coimbra 3000-354 , Portugal Background: Oral cancer is one of the most common malignant lesions of the head and neck. This cancer is an aggressive and lethal disease with no significant improvements in the overall survival in the last decades. Moreover, the incidence of oral HPV-positive tumors is rising, especially in young people. This oral neoplasm develops through numerous molecular imbalances that affect key genes and signaling pathways; however, the molecular mechanisms involved in the pathogenesis and progression of oral tumors are still to be fully determined. In order to improve the quality of life and long-term survival rate of these patients, it is vital to establish accurate biomarkers that help in the early diagnosis, prognosis and development of target treatments. Such biomarkers may possibly allow for selection of patients that will benefit from each therapy modality, helping in the optimization of intensity and sequence of the treatments in order to decrease side effects and improve survival. Conclusion: In this review we discuss the current knowledge of oral cancer and the potential role of omics approaches to identify molecular biomarkers in the improvement of early diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. The pursuit to improve the quality of life and decrease mortality rates of the oral patients needs to be centralized on the identification of critical genes in oral carcinogenesis. Understanding the molecular biology of oral cancer is vital for search new therapies, being the molecular-targeted therapies the most promising treatment for these patients. Oral cancer; Early diagnosis; Omics data; Molecular biomarkers; Molecular profiling - Background Oral cancer is part of a group of cancers named head and neck cancer (HNC), which enclose a wide set of diverse tumor types arising from various anatomic structures, such as oral cavity, oropharynx, larynx, hypopharynx and nasopharynx. Histopathologically, squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) represent nearly 90% of all these tumors and over 50% arise in the oral cavity [1]. The most significant and well-established risk factors related to this neoplasm are tobacco use (smoked or chewed), excessive alcohol consumption and/or human papilomavirus (HPV) infection. HPV genomic DNA is present in almost 25% of oral squamous cell carcinomas (OSCCs) [2, 3] and patients with HPV-positive oropharyngeal tumors have a better prognosis compared with HPVnegative oropharyngeal patients, although the reasons for this are not yet complete clarified [4]. It could be related to the more frequent HPV positivity in individuals having no other risk factors and to their usually different histology (poorly differentiated, basaloid) [2]. Worldwide, oral and pharyngeal tumors, when combined, represent the sixth most common cancer, with more than 300,000 estimated new cases and approximately 145,000 deaths from oral cavity cancer (including lip cancer) in 2012 [5]. Furthermore, it is estimated that its incidence will raise due to population growth, aging and the adoption of a lifestyle associated to cancer-risk factors [6]. It is interesting to note that two types of behavior and wariness have apparently contributed in opposite ways: in one way a slight decrease has been observed in the overall incidence of these tumors in the past two decades [2], which is most probably associated © The Author(s). 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. with a reduction in the prevalence of smoking [7]; on the other hand, an increase has been detected especially in oropharyngeal cancers (base of tongue and tonsillar) [8], which can be associated with the increase in oral and oropharyngeal HPV infections [7, 9]. Since oral cancer has been more common in men than in women HPV vaccination for both genders should be an option to be considered regarding HNC prevention, but further studies are needed to determine the efficacy and cost-benefit of this kind of vaccin (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: http://www.molecularcytogenetics.org/content/pdf/s13039-016-0293-1.pdf

Ilda Ribeiro, Leonor Barroso, Francisco Marques, Joana Melo, Isabel Carreira. Early detection and personalized treatment in oral cancer: the impact of omics approaches, Molecular Cytogenetics, 2016, pp. 85, 9, DOI: 10.1186/s13039-016-0293-1