A genetic view of laryngeal cancer heterogeneity

During the recent decades significant improvements in the understanding of laryngeal molecular biology allowed a better characterization of the tumor. However, despite increased molecular knowledge and clinical efforts, survival of patients with laryngeal cancer remains the same as 30 years ago. Although this result may not make major conclusions as preservation approaches were not broadly used until the time of database collection, it seems to be clear that there is still window for improvement. Although the cornerstone for laryngeal cancer eradication is to implement smoking cessation programs, survival progresses will be hopefully seen in the future. Introducing molecular biomarkers as predictive factors to determine which patients will benefit of preservation treatments may become one of the next steps to improve survival. Furthermore, the development of new therapeutic modalities joint to biomarkers to selectively apply such new therapy in these patients may help to define new modalities with improved survival. New inhibitors against Notch pathway, EGFR, VRK1 or DNA damage repair may become gold standard if we are able to identify patients that may benefit from them, either on survival or functional larynx preservation. It is the moment for an inflexion point on the way laryngeal cancer is clinically managed.