ASCO: You’re listening to a podcast from Cancer.Net. This cancer information website is produced by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, known as ASCO, the world’s leading professional organization for doctors who care for people with cancer. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guests’ statements on this podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Cancer research discussed in this podcast is ongoing, so data described here may change as research progresses. In this podcast, Dr. Kedar Kirtane discusses new research from the 2022 Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancers Symposium, held February 24-26 in Phoenix, Arizona, including research on disparities in head and neck cancer, treatment for HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancer, and strategies for reducing side effects from treatment while still keeping high effectiveness. Dr. Kirtane is an assistant member and medical oncologist at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, with a focused interest in the treatment of head, neck, and endocrine malignancies. He is also the 2022 Cancer.Net Specialty Editor for Head and Neck Cancers. View Dr. Kirtane’s disclosures at Cancer.Net. Dr. Kirtane: My name is Kedar Kirtane. I am an assistant member at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. And today, I'm going to discuss some of the highlights from the recent 2022 Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancers Symposium held in late February in Phoenix, Arizona. For many of us, it was the first in-person meeting being attended in the last few years due to the pandemic. The talks were truly fantastic, and above all, it was nice to see colleagues, friends, and collaborators from all over. There is no way I can go over every incredible talk that was presented, but I wanted to highlight a few of the talks that I found most compelling and interesting. So the first was the first keynote discussions by Dr. Sharon Spencer at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Dr. Charles Moore at Emory University. They had a wonderful discussion on cancer disparities and head and neck cancers. It is unfortunately very well documented that African Americans with head and neck cancer have worse outcomes. They discussed efforts made in both Alabama and Georgia to help combat disparities in head and neck cancer outcomes for African Americans. Dr. Moore described the evolution of his interest in tackling disparities in his local communities in the Atlanta Metropolitan area, where he first held cancer screenings out of the back of his car and seeing firsthand the poverty and lack of infrastructure that contributes to the daily disparities he encounters in his clinic. Both speakers discussed that it is imperative to increase representation of underrepresented communities into head and neck cancer clinical trials to ensure generalizability of results. And though this is very certainly easier said than done, as both speakers acknowledged, this is still an interesting aspect of clinical care that many of us encounter, where it is difficult for a variety of reasons to increase the representation of diverse communities under clinical trials. And I think this is one strong way of really doubling down and trying to combat disparities and outcomes, but I think a lot more is needed. In addition to increasing clinical trial participation, there are ways to combat implicit biases, improve local infrastructures to provide care, and engage key stakeholders for standard of care in clinical trials to minimize racial and ethnic bias. So both of these talks were really wonderful and talked about all of these things and how to incorporate them into your daily practice. As advanc