BioProject

Patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) have a poor prognosis due to the development of locoregional recurrences, distant metastases and second primary tumors. There is an urgent need for biomarkers that enable detection and monitoring of the disease to provide adequate therapeutic strategies. In this study we have investigated markers in peripheral blood cells (PBC) of 28 HNSCC patients who underwent surgery by means of expression profiling. Our hypothesis is that nucleated blood cells circulate continuously, also passing the tumor, and might change their expression profiles in response to tumor cell factors. For comparison, we enrolled a control group of 11 patients who underwent surgery in the head and neck region for non-HNSCC reasons. A set of 2,349 genes was found to be statistically different between the groups (p<0.05, false discovery rate-corrected) and the most prominently different pathways were EIF2 and mTOR signaling. These preliminary results are promising and warrant further studies on the definitive role of PBC gene expression as a biomarker for HNSCC detection and monitoring. Overall design: Two-color experiment with each individual sample in a single channel. RNA of nucleated blood cells of humans was analysed. Case-control analysis, with 28 cases, patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and 11 controls, without squamous cell carcinoma