BioProject

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a heterogeneous disease whose underlying etiology has not been explained by traditional prognostic factors such as tumor site, stage, or histology. More...

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a heterogeneous disease whose underlying etiology has not been explained by traditional prognostic factors such as tumor site, stage, or histology. Although previous studies have shown that molecular subtypes of HNSCC exist, the benefit of such a classification scheme has not been fully realized. We show that molecular subtypes of HNSCC exist; that these subtypes have distinct patterns of chromosomal gain and loss, some of which affect canonical oncogenes and tumor suppressors; and that the subtypes are biologically and clinically relevant. These subtypes provide new insight into HNSCC etiology, as well as a valuable method for classifying HNSCC tumors. Overall design: A total of 163 samples were considered. Quality control procedures were applied to microarray probe-level intensity files. A total of 138 tumor arrays remained after removing low-quality arrays, duplicate arrays, and arrays from non-HNSCC samples. The normexp background correction and loess normalization procedures were applied to the probe-level data. After log transformation, probes were matched to a common gene database to produce expression values for 15595 genes. Less...