Author information
1 Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Hepatology, Perth, Australia.
2 University of Western Australia, Medical School, Perth, Australia.
3 QIMR Berghofer, Brisbane, Australia.
4 University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
5 Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
Abstract
Clinicians need to be aware of the powerful new technologies that are being directed toward early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). A recent article by Qu C, Wang Y, Wang P, et al. Detection of early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma in asymptomatic HBsAg-seropositive individuals by liquid biopsy. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019;116:6308-6312 reported that the presence of somatic mutations and HBV integrations in circulating cell free DNA (cfDNA), the concentration of cfDNA and concentration of protein tumor markers in blood were combined with age and gender to develop a "liquid biopsy" to identify early stage HCC.