Journal of Hepatocellular Carcinoma (Sep 2021)
An Overview of the Genomic Characterization of Hepatocellular Carcinoma
Abstract
Sun Young Yim,1 Ju-Seog Lee2 1Department of Internal Medicine, Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea; 2Department of Systems Biology, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, 77030, USACorrespondence: Ju-Seog LeeDepartment of Systems Biology, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, 6565 MD Anderson Blvd., Houston, Tx, 77030, USATel +1 713 834 6154Fax +1 713 563 4235Email [email protected]: Tumor classifications based on alterations in the genome, epigenome, or proteome have revealed distinct tumor subgroups that are associated with clinical outcomes. Several landmark studies have demonstrated that such classifications can significantly improve patient outcomes by enabling tailoring of therapy to specific alterations in cancer cells. Since cancer cells accumulate numerous alterations in many cancer-related genes, it is a daunting task to find and confirm important cancer-promoting alterations as therapeutic targets or biomarkers that can predict clinical outcomes such as survival and response to treatments. To aid further advances, we provide here an overview of the current understanding of molecular and genomic subtypes of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). System-level integration of data from multiple studies and development of new technical platforms for analyzing patient samples hold great promise for the discovery of new targets for treatment and correlated biomarkers, leading to personalized medicine for treatment of HCC patients.Keywords: gene expression profile, RNA-seq, proteomics, mutations, genomic subtypes
