An active surveillance program in oral preneoplasia and translational oncology benefit

OBJECTIVE: We desired to establish an active surveillance clinic for head and neck cancer. In this review we examined. METHODS: We examined the natural history of human oral carcinogenesis, the types of preneoplastic lesions, and efforts at oral chemoprevention over the past decades for presentation here. RESULTS: We established a clinic and program for patients with oral premalignant lesions approximately over 15 years ago based on an unmetneed for this service. We have completed over 4000 outpatient visits for this cohort and have a place for referrals of difficult oral lesions. We have leveraged this population for multiple federally funded trials on oral cancer prevention as well as specimen banking. CONCLUSION: There is need for routine active surveillance for oral preneoplastic conditions in patients at high risk for conversion to cancer. There are no effective durable treatment or preventions for these individuals and we have attempted to fill this unmet need with our program.