Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma Bone Invasion: Possible Roles of E-Cadherin in Osteoclastogenesis and Bone Infiltration.

Introduction: Squamous cell carcinoma is the most common cancer of the oral cavity. When the tumor invades the bone tissue, the prognostic and survival rates decrease a lot, and the treatment becomes more aggressive, with several damages to the patient and health system. Many of the molecular mechanisms of bone invasion process are not understood yet, but it is already known that one of central processes of tumor evolution - adjacent tissues invasion and metastasis - is a large spectrum of phenotypic changes in epithelial cells to mesenchymal, in a process named as epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT).