Research and progress of peripheral blood biomarkers for hepatocellular carcinoma immunotherapy / 国际外科学杂志

ABSTRACT

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most common malignant disease in the world and one of the main causes of cancer-related death. At present, the treatment of patients with advanced HCC is very limited, and as an important research direction of advanced cancer treatment in recent years, immunotherapy has achieved good results. Up to now, scholars have tested a variety of immunotherapy methods, and the use of immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICIs) in the treatment of advanced cancer has made considerable progress. However, immunotherapy is still incurable for HCC, and the benefit of treatment is limited to a small number of patients. In the current context of liver cancer, one of the key research directions of oncology is to understand the biomarkers that predict the clinical response of immunotherapy, so as to improve patient selection, maximize clinical benefits and avoid unnecessary toxicity. Compared with tumor and surrounding tissue biomarkers, peripheral blood biomarkers play a unique role in clinical research and use because of their advantages of non-invasive detection. In this review, we summarize the peripheral blood biomarkers that play a key role in predicting the clinical response and prognosis of HCC patients.