Human Papillomavirus and Prognosis of Oropharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma: Implications for Clinical Research in Head and Neck Cancers

Oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinomas are etiologically heterogeneous, with one subset attributable primarily to human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and another to alcohol and tobacco use. These subsets are clinically and molecularly distinct, and these distinctions extend to patient prognosis. 1 In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Licitra et al 2 report that patients with HPV DNA–positive oropharyngeal cancers have an approximately 60% reduction in 5-year mortality when compared with patients with HPV-negative tumors, who have a considerably worse prognosis. These data corroborate several previous single-institutional, retrospective analyses that reported similarly improved disease