A number of emerging therapies are being investigated for head and neck cancers. Therapies that show promise for treating head and neck cancers include:

• targeted therapy
• immunotherapy (Santuray et al. 2018)
• cell therapy (Qureshi & Lee 2019).

Encourage enrolment in clinical trials where available. A pathway to clinical trials should be facilitated by the lead multidisciplinary team clinician.

The key principle for precision medicine is prompt and clinically oriented communication and coordination with an accredited laboratory and pathologist. Tissue analysis is integral for access to emerging therapies and, as such, tissue specimens should be treated carefully to enable additional histopathological or molecular diagnostic tests in certain scenarios.