ESMO 2026 | Clinical challenges and evolving treatment landscape of HPV unrelated recurrent metastatic HNSCC

Yeah, it’s a great question, and the challenge with HPV-unrelated recurrent metastatic head and neck cancer is this is a really bad disease that we see in the clinic. Very poor survival, very poor outcomes. Patients have poor performance status, poor functional status. Oftentimes, these are patients who are trach-dependent or G-tube dependent, so nutrition is a huge issue. These are patients where you may not get many shots at goal in terms of subsequent lines of therapy. In fact, in our real-world database, actually about half the patients who progress on prior platinum PD-1, actually didn’t even make it to a subsequent line of therapy, again, highlighting the challenges between these patients. So, particularly when that’s the disease that’s being treated, the opportunity to combine the most active therapies early, we hope will lead to a survival advantage, even with the limited number of options. And it highlights the unmet need for some of the other therapies that are emerging in recurrent metastatic head and neck cancer, the antibody drug conjugates for HPV, some of the HPV therapeutic vaccines, certainly anti-angiogenics and combining anti-angiogenics with PD-1 inhibitors, these are all ongoing novel therapeutic strategies that need to be further tested in order to identify a potential role in sequencing in the context of this rapidly evolving treatment landscape.