Advances in biomarkers predicting the efficacy of sorafenib in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma / 肿瘤

ABSTRACT

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common kind of cancer in human beings, and ranks the third in cancer-related death. Nowadays, sorafenib is the only approved molecular targeted agent for the treatment of advanced HCC. However, the efficacy of sorafenib varies among individuals, which is unsatisfactory. People have researched some biomarkers predicting the efficacy of sorafenib in order to optimize treatment scheme, reduce health care expenses and improve the quality of life for advanced HCC patients treated with sorafenib. The studies show that the expressions of phosphorylated extracellular signal regulated kinase (pERK), phosphorylated c-Jun at the downstream of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (JNK) signal pathway, vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 (VEGFR-2) in tumor tissues, alpha-fetoprotein (AFP), transforming growth factor (TGF) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in peripheral blood, as well as pERK/phosphorylated Akt (pAkt) expression in circulating tumor cells, are important factors to predict the efficacy of sorafenib, so these molecules have the potential of acting as predictive biomarkers for sorafenib treatment. This paper summarizes the recent clinical cohort studies on this topic.