Association of Oxidative Stress Pathway Alterations with Risk of Treatment Failure in RTOG9512: A Randomized Trial of Hyperfractionation Versus Conventional Fractionation in T2 Squamous Cell Carcinoma of the Vocal Cord

Based on the growing body of retrospectively collected and heterogeneously treated clinical cohorts and preclinical models, we investigated the clinical importance of NRF2 pathway alteration in an independent set of patients treated uniformly in the large prospective phase III trial RTOG 9512. We tested the hypothesis that patients with T2 glottic squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) harboring NRF2 pathway mutations would show radioresistance and have more local failure (LF) and locoregional failure (LRF) compared to those who did not have these mutations, using patients who received radiotherapy alone, thus removing potentially confounding effects of other therapies, like surgery or chemotherapy.