Survival
Oral tongue squamous cell carcinomas (OTSCC) are a homogenous group of head and neck tumors characterized with aggressive behavior among younger age group of patients. In this report, we have analysed genetic, transcriptomic, and epigenetic variants across genomes of 50 oral tongue primary tumors along with the human papilloma virus infection to find significant association with disease free survival. Our data identified somatic mutations in the genes NOTCH2, TP53 and LOH in 11p, and DNA methylation in SLC38A8 to be significantly associated with better disease free survival in HPV positive patients (P = 0.000175), but not in HPV negative patients (P = 0.974). We validated the latter using patients without HPV infection from TCGA (P = 0.679, N = 15 for TCGA_OralTongue; P = 0.262, N = 43 for all TCGA_HNSCC patients).