Head and Neck Tumor clinical trials at UCSF

Patients diagnosed with head and neck cancer who receive radiation therapy with and without chemotherapy develop altered sense of taste due to treatment effect, which typically arises in the second week of radiation therapy and progresses throughout the course of treatment. While some symptoms such as pain, mucositis, and xerostomia can be managed with pain medications and saliva replacements, taste alteration has an earlier onset and is a more difficult symptom to readily address and intervene upon. There are no effective established interventions for taste, although this is a major issue in the patient experience. The investigator will be examining they hypothesis that a miracle fruit cube would yield the greatest benefit to improve taste dysfunction in the beginning half of radiation treatment when taste function is decreased but not absent.

This trial evaluates how well a new therapeutic device works in managing trismus in patients who received radiation treatment for head and neck cancer. Radiation therapy is a common form of treatment in patients with head and neck cancers. However, changes to surrounding tissue following radiation therapy may lead to trismus, an inability to open the mouth fully. This can create significant functional impairment leading to malnutrition due to impaired chewing, risk of dental infections due to impaired oral hygiene, difficulty with speech, and decreased health-related quality of life. Exercise therapy is the mainstay of treatment for post-radiation trismus to help improve mobility and flexibility and increase range of mouth opening. This new device is non-invasive and is similar to other jaw stretching devices where a mouthpiece is placed between the teeth and a hand-lever is used to spread open the upper and lower jaw. However, it will also have additional sensors to measure pressure exerted by the hands and jaw as well as the distance to open the mouth which could help guide therapy. This study may help doctors customize a device to patient-specific needs, provide real-time feedback, and encourage compliance for trismus exercise therapy.

The purpose of this clinical trial is to provide study medicine(s) and learn about their safety. This study is seeking participants who: - Have benefited from ongoing study treatment as determined by the study doctor in a Pfizer-sponsored palbociclib Parent Study - Must agree to follow the reproductive criteria - Are willing and able to comply with all scheduled visits, treatment plans, and other study procedures - Can give signed informed consent documents Participants in this study will continue to receive treatment as they were in the parent study. The time by which participants will take part in this study is retrospective (after completed parent study). We will examine the experiences of people receiving the study medicine(s). This will help us determine if the study medicine(s) are safe. During this time, the participants will be monitored for the safety of the study medicine(s).

This is a single-center, non-interventional, observational study that evaluates the correlation of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing to cancer relapse for participants with head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNC) after curative-intent primary radiation or surgery.