Head and Neck Cancer Research Laboratory

The Head and Neck Cancer Lab is dedicated to increasing our understanding of head and neck cancer and to developing new treatment and prevention approaches. One overarching theme is to identify predictive biomarkers that will facilitate the identification of treatment(s) that are most effective for individual patients, thus allowing for personalized medicine. Translational resources we have developed to support our projects include cell line and animal models, a large collection of patient-derived xenografts (PDXs), and tissue microarrays containing over 500 human HNSCC research samples linked to a professionally curated clinical and pathologic database. In addition to basic and translational research, we also have experience conducting investigator-initiated clinical trials of novel therapeutics, including an antisense EGFR (epidermal growth factor receptor) gene therapy and a novel decoy oligonucleotide targeting STAT3 (signal transducer and activator of transcription).