With the introduction of immunotherapy, significant improvement has been made in the treatment of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). However, only a small subset of patients with HNSCC benefit from immunotherapy. The current biomarker, a programmed cell death protein ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression that is widely used in treatment decision making for advanced HNSCC, has only a moderate predictive value. Additionally, PD-L1-based assay has critical inherent limitations due to its highly dynamic nature and lack of standardization. With the advance in molecular techniques and our understanding of biology, more reliable, reproducible, and practical novel biomarkers are being developed. These include but are not limited to neoantigen/mutation characteristics, immune transcriptomes, tumor-infiltrating immune cell composition, cancer epigenomic, proteomics and metabolic characteristics, and plasma-based and organoid assays.
Keywords: PD-L1; biomarker; head and neck cancer; immune checkpoint inhibitor.