Hepatitis: Long-term therapy of chronic hepatitis B reverses cirrhosis

摘要

Liver cancer is the third most common cause of cancer-related mortality, with >80% of liver cancer cases classified as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Despite surgical and medical interventions being available, the prognosis for patients with HCC is ultimately poor -mostly as a result of late diagnosis. Now, findings from two research papers add new tools to the fight against HCC. In the first study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Mitchell Ho and colleagues investigated the potential of therapeutic antibodies for HCC. As such antibody-based therapies are available for other types of cancer, they reasoned that this approach might also be useful for liver cancer. In recent years, glypican-3 (GPC3) has emerged as both a diagnostic biomarker and a candidate therapeutic target in HCC. GPC3 is expressed abundantly in HCC tissue, but not in healthy liver tissue; however, its biological function and role in tumorigenesis remain unknown. Investigations of several humanized mouse monoclonal antibodies against GPC3 are already underway.