[Relevance of HPV infections in head and neck cancers : Highlights of the 2016 ASCO Annual Meeting].

The papers on human papillomavirus (HPV) infections in head and neck carcinomas presented during the ASCO Meeting in 2016 investigated factors influencing the survival of patients with known HPV status. Interestingly, women suffering from oropharyngeal carcinomas show better survival than men do. This is believed to be the consequence of differences in the immune system of male and female patients. Another interesting finding is that the HPV status in cases of locoregional recurrence of oropharyngeal carcinomas represents a positive predictive marker for patient survival. Other papers presented at the meeting compared methods used to reliably determine HPV-driven carcinomas. Of particular interest is the development of a new in situ hybridization method to determine the viral mRNA of the oncogenes E6 and E7. The results presented appear promising with regard to their accuracy in detecting HPV-driven carcinomas. Another set of papers investigated, partly in retrospective settings, interventional studies in which the HPV status of the patients was taken into account. It is noteworthy that the high doses of cisplatin that were tested in comparison with weekly administered cisplatin or the treatment with cetuximab instead of cisplatin showed positive effects in some survival calculations but were accompanied by higher toxicity. Overall the papers presented demonstrate the necessity for further epidemiologic, methodological, interventional, and in particular prospective studies.