Genomics of Oral Cancer and Oral PreCancer Lesions

The Oral Oncology Research Project leverages work regarding various bio-markers of head and neck cancer and oral epithelial dysplasia which are either unique to the oral mucosal situation or shared across malignancies in other sites. The program leverages a range of novel technologies to enable diagnosis of oral cancer at its earliest stages, and to ascertain the molecular aspects of surgical margin delineation. The research program a large scale project undertaking exomic and transcriptomic profiling of head and neck cancers and pre-cancers utilizing Next Generation Sequencing. The underlying premise of the program looks at creating a molecular signature for pre-cancerous and cancerous conditions that can be used as a molecular diagnostic or prognostic test to either replace or supplement standard histopathological interpretation of oral epithelial dysplasia and oral squamous cell carcinoma.