Risk stratification and biomarker discovery in HPV-positive oropharynx squamous cell carcinoma determined by HPV and human gene expression profile associations

Determining which HPV+ oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OPSCC) patients will respond to therapy is of utmost important for implementation of treatment de-escalation to reduce morbidity or testing of novel therapeutic approaches. Due to the lack of reliable indicators of treatment response, we explored the gene expression profile of OPSCC in order to better understand the biology of these tumors and identify novel biomarkers. In this study, we investigated human genes associated with HPV transcription in 80 OPSCC samples from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). This exploratory analysis provided a list of 582 human genes associated with HPV biology. Hierarchical clustering analysis using the 582 human genes was used to separate HPV+ OPSCC in two groups with significantly distinct survival (log-rank test p Citation Format: Frederico O. Gleber-Netto, Xiayu Rao, Kelly Erikson, Keiko Akagi, Faye M. Johnson, Jing Wang, Joseph Califano, Maura L. Gillison, Jeffrey N. Myers, Curtis R. Pickering. Risk stratification and biomarker discovery in HPV-positive oropharynx squamous cell carcinoma determined by HPV and human gene expression profile associations [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2018; 2018 Apr 14-18; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 4621.