Simon/Tolstonog lab

Treatment strategies for head and neck cancers include surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy. For many patients, the curative effect of these treatments is limited and recurrence or metastasis may occur. Our laboratory studies the concept of clonal dynamics and applies it to head and neck cancer. This concept assumes that a small number of genetically or epigenetically distinct cancer cell clones are responsible for therapeutic failures leading to local and regional recurrences and metastasis. We are therefore using DNA barcoding coupled with next generation sequencing to explore the clonal dynamics of cancer cells during cancer progression and under treatment pressure. We hypothesize that primary resistance in patients is dependent on dominant clones refractory to treatment. In addition, we are testing whether cancer recurrences could be caused by residual cancer cells undergoing neutral or competitive selective pressure. ...