Vasculogenic mimicry in hepatocellular carcinoma / 中国药学杂志

ABSTRACT

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignancy, of which the 5-year survival rate is 39% merely. HCC current treatments include surgery, interventional chemotherapy, radiofrequency ablation, and targeting drug delivery. As a typical hyper-vascular cancer, HCC can be inhibited via tumor angiogenesis inhibitors (TAI). However, TAI can not completely block the nutrient supply of the tumor tissue during treatment, since there exists a special way of blood supply named vascular mimicry (VM) in HCC. Through these pipes similar to the blood vessels HCC can communicate with the host blood vessels and thus acquire blood supply for the growth, invasion and metastasis. A growing number of studies have found that the presence of angiogenesis mimicry structure is one of the key factors limiting TAI in the treatment of liver cancer. This article gave an outline of VM and summarized the formation mechanism of VM and the research status about the hepatocarcinoma therapy.