NEWS
OKLAHOMA CITY – A newly approved National Cancer Institute-funded clinical trial aims to improve survival for head and neck cancer patients whose disease returns after radiation therapy – a setback that affects up to 40% of patients and is often associated with poor outcomes.
For these patients, surgery is currently the standard treatment, typically targeting tumors in the mouth, throat or lymph nodes of the neck. This Phase II trial will examine whether giving chemotherapy, or chemotherapy combined with immunotherapy, before surgery can improve survival compared with surgery alone.
“Even when a patient is a good surgical candidate, the operation is often aggressive and life-altering. It can mean losing the voice box, removing much of the tongue, or risking serious complications in the neck, and despite all that, outcomes are still not where we want them to be. We hope this trial identifies a treatment that will help patients live longer without the cancer returning,” said Christina Henson, M.D., associate professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and radiation oncologist at the OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center. Henson is the radiation oncology chair for the trial, which will enroll patients in Oklahoma and across the United States.
Patients deemed surgical candidates will be randomly assigned to receive chemotherapy (carboplatin and paclitaxel) before surgery; the same chemotherapies plus the immunotherapy drug cemiplimab before surgery; or surgery alone. Cemiplimab, which harnesses the body’s own immune system to fight the cancer, is a PDL1 inhibitor. The drug targets cancers that are positive for PDL1, a protein marker indicating the tumor may be vulnerable to immunotherapy. Most head and neck cancers are PDL1-positive, Henson said.
Henson’s colleague Mark Newpower, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the OU College of Medicine, is the medical physics chair for the trial. Patients with especially high-risk cancer may receive radiation therapy following surgery.
“We have worked to standardize the technical details of this trial. It has been gratifying to contribute the institutional knowledge of our radiation oncology department,” said Newpower, who is the lead proton physicist for OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center.
For more information about the trial, visit https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07195734.
About the University of Oklahoma
Founded in 1890, the University of Oklahoma is a public research university with campuses in Norman, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. As the state’s flagship university, OU serves the educational, cultural, economic and health care needs of the state, region and nation. In Oklahoma City, the OU Health Campus is one of the nation’s few academic health centers with seven health profession colleges located on the same campus. The OU Health Campus serves approximately 4,000 students in more than 70 undergraduate and graduate degree programs spanning Oklahoma City and Tulsa and is the leading research institution in Oklahoma. For more information about the OU Health Campus, visit www.ouhsc.edu.
The Hudson Fellows in Public Health Program – a select group of doctoral students at the University of Oklahoma Hudson College of Public Health – will observe its 10th anniversary on April 9 with the annual Hudson Fellows Symposium. The event will feature a noontime lecture by health innovation leader Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., MBA.
New research from University of Oklahoma researchers, published in Cell Reports, reveals that a hormone that reverses obesity in mice appears to work by signaling to a brain region involved in metabolism and appetite regulation, the same area targeted by the popular GLP-1 drugs.
The University of Oklahoma’s Max Westheimer Airport has received the prestigious Airport of the Year Award for 2026 from the Oklahoma Airport Operators Association. Airport Director Lance Lamkin was also named the 2026 Airport Manager of the Year.
