Dr Sarju Vasani and his team are working to improve oral cancer diagnosis, by using patients’ saliva. This would support earlier diagnosis – which increases survival rates by up to 300% – and avoid invasive and painful procedures like biopsies.

More than half of oral cancer patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage. This decreases survival rates and often requires multiple treatments, which can provide their own additional challenges. However, detecting oral cancer earlier (stage I and II) can increase 5-year survival rates from 20% (stage III and IV), to 80%.

Currently oral cancers are diagnosed based on tissue biopsies, which can be invasive and painful. Also, it is impractical to use repeated tissue biopsies to assess if the cancer has come back after treatment.  

Dr Vasani’s team believe saliva samples could help to overcome these challenges – a form of ‘liquid biopsy’. Saliva is full of molecules including messenger RNA (mRNA) which can be used to look for specific diseases.

This project’s findings to date (2022) support the conclusion that saliva-based mRNAs can successfully predict oral cancer. Dr Vasani and his team were the first in the world to discover an asymptomatic oropharyngeal cancer using a saliva test.

Nevertheless, a larger study is still needed to further validate the utility of saliva-based mRNAs prior to clinical uptake.

Dr Vasani and his team are committed to continuing their work, to improve care and survival rates for oral cancer patients.