Omics and Oral Cancers: Comprehensive Profiles & Diagnostic and Therapeutic Potential

Although oral cancer represents one of the most common types of human cancers, the prognosis and mortality have remained almost unaltered through the last years. The difficulty in the clinical management of oral cancers occurs due to the complexity of their pathogenesis. Several lines of evidence have demonstrated that certain types of oral cancers, for instance oral squamous cell carcinoma, arises from the combination of various distinct biological dysregulations that involve gene expression, protein and metabolite levels and microbial diversity. On this point, the “omics” present great potential to uncover the molecular basis of oral cancers and contribute to improve their clinical outcome. Omics approaches encompass high-throughput techniques able to evaluate quantitatively and/or qualitatively a given class of biomolecules in a biological sample. “Omics”-driven studies have been promising in the understanding of plenty of valuable aspects of cancers, including the description of their pathogenesis, identification of biomarkers and novel therapies.

The goal of this Research Topic is to summarize and discuss the most recent scientific efforts based on the exploration of omic sciences toward the comprehension of the complex pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment of oral cancers. This collection also aims to address challenges and novel research directions.

We invite authors to submit research, meta-analyses and review articles applying omics approaches to investigate the following topics:

• Elucidation of molecular mechanisms involved the complex pathophysiology of oral cancers, including tumour growth, survival, cell death and metastasis
• Understanding the molecular alterations associated with malignant transformation of potentially malignant lesions
• Metagenomic analyses focused on determining the relationship of oral microbiome and oral cancer
• Identification of diagnostic, classification, prognostic, cancer monitoring and/or drug resistance biomarkers
• Investigations focused on oral cancer prevention strategies
• Identification of therapeutic targets
• Determination of the molecular signaling implicated in drug resistance

We also welcome articles exploring other relevant aspects of oral cancer using “omics”.

Keywords: Oral cancer, Oral Squamous cell carcinoma, Genomics, Epigenomics, Transcriptomics, Proteomics, Metabolomics, Potentially malignant lesions, Personalized medicine

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.