# Assessing individual head and neck squamous cell carcinoma patient response to therapy through integration of functional and genomic data

## TL;DR

This paper explores how combining genomic and functional data can help predict how individual head and neck cancer patients will respond to treatment.

## Contribution

The study introduces HNSCC-specific inhibitor panels and visual analytics to better understand drug response patterns in head and neck cancer.

## Key findings

- HNSCC-specific inhibitor panels capture pathway diversity for functional testing of patient-derived tumor cells.
- Integration of functional and genomic data provides deeper insights into drug response patterns.
- Visual analytics may aid precision oncology in evaluating targeted therapies for HNSCC.

## Abstract

Even though head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is the seventh most common cancer worldwide, there are only two PD-1 targeted immunotherapies (pembrolizumab and nivolumab) and one tumor intrinsic EGFR targeted therapy (cetuximab) that are FDA approved for treatment of HNSCC. Taking advantage of a high throughput inhibitor assay and computational tools originally showing success in leukemia, we designed and employed HNSCC-specific inhibitor panels that capture the diversity of aberrational pathways in HNSCC to test viable cells derived from patients’ HNSCC tumors. This provides a functional context to the multi-omic readouts conducted on these samples (mutations, protein expression and copy number alterations). In addition to generating these deeply characterized functional genomics datasets, we also developed additional visual analytics that have the potential to provide greater insight into HNSCC drug response patterns and potentially aid precision oncology tumor boards in evaluation and assessment of effective targeted therapeutic agents.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-03111-7.