Mechanisms of therapy resistance in squamous cell carcinomas

Despite advances in cancer research, chemotherapy (CT) and radiotherapy (RT) remain the conventional treatments for many tumors. It is estimated that up to 50% of cancer patients are treated with RT and cisplatin-based CT is administered to 10-20% of all cancer patients. This is the case of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC) which arises from the epithelial cells of the oral cavity, pharynx or larynx, and whose survival rate, around 50%, has not improved in the last 30 years. Cisplatin-based chemoradiotherapy (CRT) is the standard treatment of choice for this type of tumor, with a response rate barely exceeding 50%. HNSCCs are very heterogeneous and complex at the genomic level and share many commonalities with squamous cell carcinomas (SCCs) arising from other anatomical sites, such as lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC), which accounts for 20-25% of all lung cancers and has an estimated 5-year survival rate of only 17%. As for HNSCCs, there are almost no approved targete