Developments in research and prevention in head, neck and oral cancer

Prof Richard Shaw - University of Liverpool Cancer Research Centre, Liverpool, UK

How are you dealing with pre-malignant lesions

Some of our interest in head and neck research is actually prevention of cancer, which seems… We always say when we go to medical school that prevention is better than cure but a lot of research in oncology is directed towards late disease, metastasis and recurrence where the benefits are going to be small usually. I’m quite interested in prevention of oral cancer. So we have clinics full of patients who have known pre-malignant lesions and how we can tackle those areas with various chemoprevention trials and with biomarkers that predict the patients that are likely to transform. In Liverpool, in concert with some other units, we’re looking at some new trials funded looking at chemoprevention, looking at repurposed drugs and looking at epigenetic modifiers to try and reverse pre-malignant lesions.

Are there any published studies?

We’ve published a number of studies on epigenetics of pre-malignant lesions and we feel that the earliest stages of cancer are likely as much or more an epigenetic phenomenon than a genetic. So we think it’s a reasonably sensible target to look at epigenetic modifiers, some of which are repurposed drugs and have low toxicity. But to be able to transform what we’ve learned in the research lab from a lot of tissue that has been banked into a clinical trial will be quite exciting.