A team of ProCan® scientists and clinical oncologists from Princess Alexandra Hospital, Brisbane, have developed a way to predict which patients are at highest risk of recurrence after treatment for a type of throat cancer.

Known as Human Papillomavirus (HPV)‐associated oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (HPV+OPSCC), this throat cancer is caused by the HPV16 virus (rather than the better-known causes: alcohol and tobacco). The incidence of the disease is increasing, particularly in younger people.

The work, led by Dr Christopher Jackson and Professor Benedict Panizza in Brisbane and ProCan’s co-founder Professor Phil Robinson in Sydney, was published in Cancer Research Communications.

Professor Robinson said there was an urgent unmet need to find a test that would help predict which HPV+OPSCC patients have a high risk that their cancer will return after treatment. This would help clinicians distinguish between the patients who need more intensive treatment from those for whom the intensity of treatment, and therefore the likelihood of side-effects, can safely be reduced.

“In this study, the ProCan team analysed pre-treatment cancer biopsies from 124 patients, and compared the molecular characteristics of those whose disease recurred vs those that didn’t. We found a pattern (or ‘signature’) in the levels of 26 different molecules (peptides) in the cancers that classified patients as having low, intermediate, or high risk of disease relapse,’’ Professor Robinson said. “After this signature is confirmed in a separate group of patients, we expect it will be used to guide the selection of patients for future treatment de-escalation trials, where those identified as having a low risk of relapse will have reduced radiotherapy and chemotherapy.’’

This advance offers the prospect of personalising treatment strategies for HPV+OPSCC patients and contributing to improved patient outcomes by tailoring therapy to individual risk profiles and avoiding the most intensive treatments and their side effects when it is safe to do so.

The work is the result of an extensive collaboration between ProCan scientists Jia (Jenny) Liu, Asim Anees, Zainab Noor, Natasha Lucas, Dylan Xavier, Peter Hains, Daniel Bucio-Noble, Qing Zhong, Steve Williams, Adel Aref, and Roger Reddel, with Christopher Jackson and Benedict Panizza and their teams from Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane.

You can read the full publication here: https://doi.org/10.1158/2767-9...