The research holds promise for the treatment of HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers in patients who have received a poor prognosis, according to  first author Takuya Nakagawa, formerly a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego School of Medicine, now an assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery at Chiba University Hospital and Health and Disease Omics Center at Chiba University in Japan. Selectively targeting tumors with ecDNA-disrupting therapeutics could slow their growth while leaving normal cells intact.

“There are now multiple types of drugs that are being developed both in the laboratory and in clinical trials to specifically target cancers that rely on ecDNA to grow,” said senior author Joseph Califano, MD, professor of otolaryngology at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of the Gleiberman Head and Neck Cancer Center at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center.
Califano lab is investigating which drugs work best to target ecDNA in general as well as hybrid ecDNA in particular. It is also studying other ways in which HPV virus-associated ecDNA can directly affect genes all over the human chromosome in addition to those encoded in ecDNA structures.

The study was published in Nature Communications on March 26, 2025.