Conditions: Mouth Neoplasms
Keywords: Calcitriol Celecoxib Immunotherapy
Allocation: RANDOMIZED | Intervention model: PARALLEL
Enrollment: 21
Healthy volunteers: no

Brief summary:
The poor survival of Veterans with oral cancer underscores the significance of identifying new treatment approaches. The proposed studies will test a new 2 pronged immunotherapeutic approach for oral cancer patients which lessen the immune inhibitory environment while maturing cells that can stimulate T cell reactivity against oral cancer cells.

Detailed description:
The hypothesis of this study is beneficial T cell reactivity in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) tumors can be synergistically stimulated by blocking suppressor endothelial cells and their induction of other inhibitory cell populations while also maturing immune inhibitory CD34+ cells into antigen-presenting dendritic cells.

To test this hypothesis, newly diagnosed OSCC patients will be administered the cyclooxigenase 2 inhibitor celecoxib and/or Calcitriol for the 3 week duration between cancer diagnosis and surgical treatment. The following aims will test the immunological and clinical effectiveness of the combination treatment:

* 1\. To block the suppressive activity of endothelial cells and increase the levels of dendritic that are stimulatory to T cell reactivity, thereby synergistically increasing intratumoral T cell reactivity. These functional immune analyses will use OSCC tissues removed from untreated patients or patients treated with celecoxib and/or Calcitriol.
* 2\. To reduce development of OSCC recurrences by synergistically stimulating intratumoral T cell reactivity with celecoxib to block suppressor endothelial cell activity and Calcitriol to mature CD34+ suppressor cells into T cell stimulatory dendritic cells.

Arms:
arm 1: Celecoxib treatment prior to surgery arm 2: Treatment with Calcitriol prior to surgery arm 3: Treatment with Celecoxib plus Calcitriol prior to surgery. arm 4: no treatment prior to surgery

Interventions: intervention 1: Celecoxib intervention 2: Calcitriol intervention 3: Celecoxib plus Calcitriol
Intervention descriptions: intervention 1: Celecoxib (400 mg twice daily) intervention 2: 3 week pre-surgical enteral treatment of Calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3) (3 cycles of 4 microg Calcitriol 3 for each of 3 sequential days followed by 4 days of no treatment) intervention 3: 3 week pre-surgical enteral treatment of Calcitriol (1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3) (3 cycles of 4 microg Calcitriol for each of 3 sequential days followed by 4 days of no treatment) plus Celecoxib (400 mg twice daily)

Protocol document: