Farlow Laboratory

Dr. Farlow participates in national and international organizations that focus on designing and implementing high quality multicenter clinical trials and cooperative initiatives. Together with colleagues in medical oncology, radiation oncology, speech language pathology and others, these trials focus on improving survival from cancer, understanding novel agents and decreasing or mitigating toxicities from current cancer treatments. As part of the ORIEN Network, Indiana University School of Medicine also contributes to and participates in the application of multi-omic technologies to carefully curated clinical datasets to characterize the biology of head and neck cancer.

At the institutional level, Dr. Farlow is leading an effort to leverage patient-reported symptoms for earlier identification of and targeted management of issues commonly encountered in head and neck cancer survivors, including swallowing difficulty, lymphedema, neck fibrosis, fatigue and mood/emotional disturbances. Other institutional trials include characterization of cachexia in tissue from head and neck surgery, deintensification trials in human papillomavirus-mediated oropharynx cancer, and sentinel lymph node biopsy in high-risk head and neck cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma.

The Head and Neck Surgery program is one of the highest volume centers for major head and neck surgery in the Midwest and the country. This affords Dr. Farlow and her team to utilize both institutional and national clinical databases to better understand patterns of disease presentation, treatment modalities and response to treatment. Recent efforts also include use of artificial intelligence in patient care throughout the cancer survivorship journey.