New Model Tracks Oral Cancer Development and Progression

New Model Tracks Oral Cancer Development and Progression

According to the Oral Cancer Foundation, more than 40,000 individuals will be diagnosed with oral cancer this year, and only half this number will be alive in 5 years. This is because oral cancer often remains undiagnosed until it has progressed to its most advanced stage, making treatment more complex and decreasing survival rates. The cause of oral cancer is often linked to lifestyle behaviors, including tobacco and alcohol use—although more cases of this deadly disease are occurring in individuals who have never smoked and do not drink. To help explain this phenomenon, a team of researchers has developed a framework designed to monitor oral cancer development, progression, and recurrence.

New York University (NYU) College of Dentistry researchers, working alongside scientists from the University of California, San Francisco, sought to determine the changes occurring in the microbial environment that may influence the development and growth of oral lesions and cancers. As noted by Brian Schmidt, DDS, MD, PhD, professor of oral and maxillofacial surgery and director of the Bluestone Center for Clinical Research at the NYU College of Dentistry, “The major risk factors—tobacco and alcohol use—alone cannot explain the changes in incidence, because oral cancer also commonly occurs in patients without a history of tobacco or alcohol exposure.”

The study, “Changes in Abundance of Oral Microbiota Associated with Oral Cancer,” was published online in June by PLOS ONE. The findings document the team’s framework for exploiting the oral microbiome for the monitoring of oral cancer. Researchers found that significant decreases in the amount of Firmicutes and Actinobacteria were observed for pre-cancerous lesions compared to healthy tissue from the same patient. Using the abundance of the phyla alone, the scientists were able to separate the cancerous samples from precancerous and normal samples.

“The oral cavity offers a relatively unique opportunity to screen at-risk individuals for [oral] cancer, because the lesions can be seen, and, as we found, the shift in the microbiome of the cancer and precancer lesions compared to anatomically matched clinically normal tissue from the same individual can be detected in noninvasively collected swab samples,” notes Schmidt.

Future studies with a greater number of participants are recommended to confirm this potential biomarker for precancerous lesions.

Hygiene Connection E-Newsletter

July 2014