Special Issue Introduction
New challenging issues are prompting a paradigmatic change in surveillance, early diagnosis, therapy decision making and outcome monitoring of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).
In the last decades, the epidemiologic features (age at onset, etiology of the underlying chronic liver disease, and comorbidities) of HCC have consistently changed. Overall, the risk of HCC development in patients with chronic viral hepatitis appears to be reduced by the new antiviral therapies, but the individual risk remains to be defined according to host and liver disease factors. Furthermore, the new therapeutic options for HCC are challenging the criteria to stage and manage the patients with HCC. New biomarkers have been identified by genetic, immune-metric, molecular biology (microRNA profiling by qPCR and NGS) and immune-histo-chemistry techniques and their kinetics are studied both
in vitro, transgenic mouse models and in patients. In this special issue of
Hepatoma Research, we will discuss as all these new achievements prompt new diagnostic and monitoring algorithms tailored according to the different prototypes of patients at risk or with HCC.