Squamous cell cancers of the head and neck (SCCHN), also known as head and neck cancers (HNC) encompass malignancies of the oral cavity, larynx, nasopharynx and pharynx, and are diagnosed in over 500,000 patients worldwide each year, accounting for 5% of all malignancies. It is estimated that approximately 50,000 patients develop head and neck cancer annually in the United States, of whom approximately 50% succumb to this cancer. For most cases of SCCHN, treatment is multimodal, often combining surgery or irradiation with chemotherapy; even successfully treated patients frequently experience durable and severe side effects. Improving cure rates and reducing chronic morbidity are urgent clinical needs for head and neck cancer. However, in contrast to cancer types such as breast or prostate that have been much studied and have well-defined biology, until recently, relatively few researchers investigated the molecular basis of HNC, making it difficult to design targeted treatments with better efficacy and less debilitating side effects. This volume will provide an overview of the factors contributing to disease pathogenesis, including the recognition of discrete molecular subtypes with distinct etiology, prognosis, and treatment response. This volume will familiarize the reader with the critical signaling pathways and oncogenic drivers for HNC. It will outline the differences between HPV-positive and HPV-negative disease, and how these differences affect treatment choice and outcome. The book will emphasize developments in the past five years, including the growing understanding of the genomic and epigenomic features of the disease based on analysis of next generation sequencing (NGS) data, and timely topics such as the analysis of HNC stem cell populations, non-coding mRNAs, and inflammatory response. It will address exciting new therapeutic approaches such as the use of immunotherapies to treat HNC patients. Overall, the book will provide the reader with current understanding of the biology and treatment of the disease, and describe timely questions that will guide future research aimed at controlling and curing this disease.

A search is presented for a heavy vector-like quark, decaying into a b quark and a W boson, which is produced singly in association with a light flavor quark and a b quark. The analysis is performed using a data sample of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = $ 13 TeV collected at the LHC in 2015. The data set used in the analysis corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 2.3 inverse-femtobarns. The search is carried out using events containing one electron or muon, at least one b-tagged jet with large transverse momentum, at least one jet in the forward region of the detector, and missing transverse momentum. No excess over the standard model prediction is observed. Upper limits are placed on the production cross section of heavy exotic quarks: a T quark with a charge of 2/3, and a Y quark with a charge of -4/3. For Y quarks with coupling of 0.5 and B(Y to bW) = 100%, the observed (expected) lower mass limits are 1.40 (1.0) TeV. This is the most stringent limit to date on the single production of the Y vector-like quark.

Measurements of the cross sections for top quark pairs produced in association with a W or Z boson are presented, using 8 TeV pp collision data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 fb-1, collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. We found that final states are selected in which the associated W boson decays to a charged lepton and a neutrino or the Z boson decays to two charged leptons. Signal events are identified by matching reconstructed objects in the detector to specific final state particles from tt-W or tt-Z decays. The tt-W cross section is measured to be 382+117 -102 fb with a significance of 4.8 standard deviations from the background-only hypothesis. The tt-Z cross section is measured to be 242+65 -55 fb with a significance of 6.4 standard deviations from the background-only hypothesis. These measurements are used to set bounds on five anomalous dimension-six operators that would affect the tt-W and tt-Z cross sections.