Nucleotide excision repair and head and neck cancers

Genome integrity maintenance is crucial for cell survival and for counteracting cancer onset and progression. Mammary cells invest great amount of energy in DNA repair, in order to avoid errors accumulation in DNA sequence. Nucleotide Excision Repair (NER) removes a broad spectrum of DNA damages, mainly bulky DNA lesions. Tissues of Head and Neck region are heavily exposed to bulky lesions inducing carcinogens, this making NER process of great interest in the field. Here we review the recent literature about NER in HNC and we also discuss the role played by NER in HNSCC in the chromatin context; to this aim we particularly focus on the role played by histones chaperon CAF-1, essential in restoring the chromatin structure following DNA replication and DNA damage repair, including NER. A better understanding of basic mechanisms underlying the DNA damage response, particularly involving NER, especially in the chromatin context, will provide us with new promising way to bypass the repair block, possibly becoming an unexpected mode of “transversal” control also of the proliferative deregulation, classically observed in HNSCC.