Treatment options of patients with advanced head and neck cancer developed in the last years. Surgical approaches with or without radiotherapy used to be the standard therapy for a long time. Calls for organ preservation, poor overall survival and unsatisfactory quality of life made changes in this therapy regime necessary. Systemical approaches were evaluated, first concepts of platinum-based chemotherapy paired with 5-fluorouracil (PF) made up the basis of induction chemotherapy (ICT). Hypothesized advantage of this regime was improvement in local and distant tumor responsiveness with an acceptable toxicity profile. Further investigations proved the addition of docetaxel (TPF) superior to PF, which presents the gold standard of current induction chemotherapy regimes. Long-term results underlining well-known aspects of this regime as well as new approaches of induction chemotherapy were published at ASCO 2011, including the addition of bioimmunotherapy to radiotherapy, adding nanoparticle-bound albumin to chemotherapy and investigations in toxicity reduction. Further investigations are still made not only to increase survival outcomes and local control but also to improve quality of life by reducing acute and late toxicities.

The aim of systemic induction chemotherapy is organ preservation and tumor downstaging to improve resectability and reduce surgical risk. Not only the prolongation of overall survival but also the entitlement to a better quality of life during the treatment of patients with head and neck squamous cell cancer (HNSCC) have made changes to current treatment regimes necessary. Disappointing results prevented the breakthrough of PF therapy (cisplatin and 5-fluorouracil, 5-FU). New approaches using docetaxel, cisplatin and 5-FU (TPF) as a triple combination as well as the additional extension of novel biological targets within study designs are cause for fresh hope. Thus, the TPF combination has been established as the standard induction chemotherapy regime.