Peng Xuenan, Gong Caifeng, Zhang Wen, Zhou Aiping
Department of Medical Oncology, National Cancer Center/National Clinical Research Center for Cancer/Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China.
Front Oncol. 2023 Jan 16;12:1091088. doi: 10.3389/fonc.2022.1091088. eCollection 2022.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common liver cancer and one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths in the world. Mono-immunotherapy and combination therapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) and multitargeted tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) or anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) inhibitors have become new standard therapies in advanced HCC (aHCC). However, the clinical benefit of these treatments is still limited. Thus, proper biomarkers which can predict treatment response to immunotherapy to maximize clinical benefit while sparing unnecessary toxicity are urgently needed. Contrary to other malignancies, up until now, no acknowledged biomarkers are available to predict resistance or response to immunotherapy for HCC patients. Furthermore, biomarkers, which are established in other cancer types, such as programmed death ligand 1 (PD-L1) expression and tumor mutational burden (TMB), have no stable predictive effect in HCC. Thus, plenty of research focusing on biomarkers for HCC is under exploration. In this review, we summarize the predictive and prognostic biomarkers as well as the potential predictive mechanism in order to guide future research direction for biomarker exploration and clinical treatment options in HCC.
肝细胞癌（HCC）是最常见的肝癌，也是全球癌症相关死亡的主要原因之一。单免疫疗法以及免疫检查点抑制剂（ICIs）与多靶点酪氨酸激酶抑制剂（TKIs）或抗血管内皮生长因子（抗VEGF）抑制剂的联合疗法已成为晚期HCC（aHCC）的新标准疗法。然而，这些治疗的临床获益仍然有限。因此，迫切需要合适的生物标志物来预测免疫治疗的反应，以在避免不必要毒性的同时最大化临床获益。与其他恶性肿瘤不同，到目前为止，尚无公认的生物标志物可用于预测HCC患者对免疫治疗的耐药性或反应。此外，在其他癌症类型中建立的生物标志物，如程序性死亡配体1（PD-L1）表达和肿瘤突变负荷（TMB），在HCC中没有稳定的预测作用。因此，大量针对HCC生物标志物的研究正在探索中。在本综述中，我们总结了预测性和预后性生物标志物以及潜在的预测机制，以指导未来HCC生物标志物探索和临床治疗选择的研究方向。
