**1. Introduction**

178 Carcinogenesis, Diagnosis, and Molecular Targeted Treatment for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma

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Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) is a common head and neck cancer in most of the countries of the Mediterranean Area (MA) and North Africa (NA). Its incidence is variable from <1 in sporadic areas to 2-7/100000 in NA and MA to 20-30/100000 in Southern China and Southeast Asia (Boussen et al,2010; Lee et al, 1992). It's different from other head and neck cancers due to its particular epidemiology, natural history and therapeutic considerations (Boussen et al, 2010; Lee et al, 1992).

It's highly radiosensitive and chemosensitive. Loco-regional radiotherapy (RT) remains the primary treatment for early stage disease (T1-T2, N0, N1), while combined chemotherapyradiotherapy became the gold therapeutic standard in locally advanced disease i.e T3-T4, N2-N3 (Boussen et al, 2010; Lee et al, 1992; Baujat et al, 2006). Combined treatment leads to a significant improvement on overall and disease-free survivals, but NPC remains at a high metastatic risk, requiring the search for new salvage therapeutic protocols (Boussen et al, 2010; Lee et al, 1992: Xu et al, 2010). This paper will focus on recent data on epidemiology and progresses on medical therapies in NPC.
