Mobile website
Expert Forum
Differentiation therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma
- Article
- Figures
- Metrics
- Preview PDF
- Reference
- Related
- Cited by
- Materials
Abstract:
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide. Despite great advances made in diagnosis and treatment of HCC, its prognosis is poor and the mortality rate remains high. Differentiation therapy introduces an attractive concept that may shed new light on HCC treatment. Differentiation therapy has been successfully used in clinical treatment of hematological tumors; and classic example is all-trans retinoic acid in the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia, but the clinical use of differentiation therapy in the treatment of malignant solid tumor has been limited. Up to now there have been few HCC-specific differentiation-inducing agents, and their clinical application is limited. Agents that targeting signal transduction pathway molecules or transcriptional factors associated with the differentiation of cancer stem cells may induce the differentiation of HCC. Overexpression of hepatocyte nuclear factor 4α, which is a transcriptional factor closely related to the differentiation of hepatocytes, can effectively induce the differentiation of hepatoma cells, especially liver cancer stem cells. There are lots of aberrant epigenetic changes in the development and progression of tumors, such as altered methylation and acetylation as well as dysregulated expression of microRNA, and some are correlated to the differentiation of tumors. Agents targeting these epigenetic alterations such as inhibitor of histone deacetylase can induce the differentiation of tumors in vitro and in vivo. In all, the cancer stem cell theory and the development of epigenetic may cast new lights on differentiation therapy of HCC.
Keywords:
Project Supported:
Project supported by the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars of China (No.30825020)
Clc Number:
