Identification of Prognostic Biomarkers for Progression of Invasive Squamous Cell Carcinoma

We will then extract DNA from tissue sections and blood and use a custom targeted sequencing panel of 23 cancer driver genes with significant mutations in squamous cell carcinoma that we have developed to find the prognostic biomarkers. The DNA will be used in a PCR reaction to generate amplicons for library preparation using Illumina Nextera XT library preparation protocol and targeted sequencing on the Illumina Hiseq sequencer. The reads will be aligned to the HG19 using BWA aligner and variant detection performed with Agilent SureCall and GATK analytic tools.