Hi Brian --

Actually have heard of other centers now testing for HPV (this from folks at Hopkins doing HPV research) -- also as you know it is becoming more routine for women (as a screen, not just for high-risk) and hopefully this will translate over to the oral cancer side.
My GYN plans to test me when I see her next week.

As to whether treatment is tailored -- did meet one fellow yesterday who was long-time smoker with stage IV SCC - a bulky mouth tumor and mets on both sides of neck and they are hitting him fairly hard -- using new Erbitux-like drug as induction chemo, daily low-dose cisplatin and IMRT (which is part of the new drug trial protocol.) He said they were going to treat him as aggressively as they could considering his co-existing heart problems, in part because his disease was so advanced and in part because he was a smoker.

The current thinking is that *at some future time* treatment for HPV-positive HNC will differ as the tumors are biologically different (different proteins are over- or under-expressed from usual HNC tumor) and that newer drugs will be targeted to these differences. However this is a long time away, they are still not sure how the virus actually induces the cancer.

Gail