• 1/24/2007
  • Usurbil, Spain
  • press release
  • Basque Research (www.basqueresearch.com)

A researcher of the University of Navarra Beatriz Honorato has developed a panel of markers which distinguish those patients with squamous cell cancer of the head and neck who have the best survival rates. Her doctoral dissertation, defended at the School of Sciences and developed in the Biotechnology Laboratory of the University Hospital, may help to optimize chemotherapy and X-ray treatments, according to the current situation of each patient.

For her dissertation, the scientist analyzed the response mechanisms to the therapies against tumorous tissues. In this way, knowing that the DNA repair systems are involved in the response to chemotherapy or X-ray therapy, Dr. Honorato has made advances in the study of the phenomena of resistance to these therapies in order to predict which patients will respond best. In speaking of resistance phenomena, we are referring to the absence of response to the treatment, which translates into the fact that the tumor either does not reduce in size, or else increases in size.

Despite recent advances in the struggle against this disease, those patients with locally advanced cancers constitute a group with a poor prognosis, and this situation has not improved over the last ten years. With the objective of halting this tendency, her research has examined the involvement of these repair systems in the prognosis of all types of cancer patients.

More than 4,000 new cases each year in Spain

Head and neck cancer is one of the tumors with the highest mortality rates in Spain, and affects twice the number of men as women. In addition, each year 4,000 new cases of this cancer are detected. The statistics around the world vary according to geographic factors. For instance, in the U.S. these cancers involve 5% of the malignant cancers diagnosed, whereas in Southeast Asia, they are responsible for 20% of the deaths from cancer.

By distinguishing patients with higher probabilities of survival will also enable the creation of response profiles to the most effective treatments, which have the lowest rates of reappearance after the period of convalescence.