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. The main limitation of CT and RT in the clinic is, beyond their toxicity, the high incidence of resistance and, consequently, the frequent tumor relapse. Therefore, we aim to identify new therapeutic strategies to overcome resistance to the standard of care for SCCs by using patient-derived organoids (PDOs) as the main preclinical experimental model.