Cancer: Overview of Types, Symptoms, & Treatments: Liver Cancer

This program highlights the advances in liver transplantation surgery over the years. The hepatitis C epidemic has fueled an international need for liver transplantation, and innovations in surgical treatments and antirejection therapies are helping ever-increasing numbers of people to live healthy lives with new livers. The organ’s unique ability to regenerate has led to one of the most exciting operations: the living donor liver transplant. Through patients’ stories and interviews with experts, the program shows how liver transplantation can save lives and bring health and healing to families around the world.

It was thought that only alcoholics got cirrhosis of the liver, but doctors now realize that this is not necessarily the case, as our genes and other aspects of our lifestyles all potentially play a part in damaging the organ. This episode follows the story of Philip Parker, who is on the waiting list for a liver transplant. Surgeons are filmed replacing his liver. Dr. Alice Roberts also visits scientists at Newcastle University who hope to be able to grow replacement livers from stem cells obtained from a baby’s umbilical cord. Although the liver has the ability to regenerate, with liver disease on the increase both from alcohol and other causes, this is an organ in peril. A BBC Production.

Liver cancer is an aggressive disease with a poor outcome. Several hepatic stem/progenitor markers are useful for isolating a subset of liver cells with stem cell features, known as cancer stem cells (CSCs). These cells are responsible for tumor relapse, metastasis, and chemoresistance. Liver CSCs dictate a hierarchical organization that is shared in both organogenesis and tumorigenesis. An increased understanding of the molecular signaling events that regulate cellular hierarchy and stemness, and success in defining key CSC-specific genes, have opened up new avenues to accelerate the development of novel diagnostic and treatment strategies. This Review highlights recent advances in understanding the pathogenesis of liver CSCs and discusses unanswered questions about the concept of liver CSCs.

Identifying robust survival subgroups of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) will significantly improve patient care. Currently, endeavor of integrating multi-omics data to explicitly predict HCC survival from multiple patient cohorts is lacking. To fill this gap, we present a deep learning (DL)-based model on HCC that robustly differentiates survival subpopulations of patients in six cohorts. We built the DL-based, survival-sensitive model on 360 HCC patients' data using RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq), miRNA sequencing (miRNA-Seq), and methylation data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which predicts prognosis as good as an alternative model where genomics and clinical data are both considered. This DL-based model provides two optimal subgroups of patients with significant survival differences ( = 7.13e-6) and good model fitness [concordance index (C-index) = 0.68]. More aggressive subtype is associated with frequent inactivation mutations, higher expression of stemness markers ( and ) and tumor marker , and activated Wnt and Akt signaling pathways. We validated this multi-omics model on five external datasets of various omics types: LIRI-JP cohort ( = 230, C-index = 0.75), NCI cohort ( = 221, C-index = 0.67), Chinese cohort ( = 166, C-index = 0.69), E-TABM-36 cohort ( = 40, C-index = 0.77), and Hawaiian cohort ( = 27, C-index = 0.82). This is the first study to employ DL to identify multi-omics features linked to the differential survival of patients with HCC. Given its robustness over multiple cohorts, we expect this workflow to be useful at predicting HCC prognosis prediction. .