Review
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2015. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Hepatol. Sep 18, 2015; 7(20): 2245-2263
Published online Sep 18, 2015. doi: 10.4254/wjh.v7.i20.2245
Evaluation of antiangiogenic efficacy in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma: Biomarkers and functional imaging
Mohamed Bouattour, Audrey Payancé, Johanna Wassermann
Mohamed Bouattour, Audrey Payancé, Department of Hepatology, Beaujon University Hospital (AP-HP - Paris 7 Diderot), 92110 Clichy, France
Johanna Wassermann, Department of Medical Oncology, La Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital (AP-HP - Paris 6 Pierre et Marie Curie), 75013 Paris, France
Author contributions: All the authors contributed equally to this review; Bouattour M participated in the conception and the design of the manuscript; Bouattour M, Payancé A and Wassermann J collected and analyzed data and reviewed literature data; Bouattour M wrote the manuscript; all the authors revised the manuscript and approved the final version.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Mohamed Bouattour has received occasional honoraria for lectures and travel grants from Bayer Pharma; Audrey Payancé and Johanna Wassermann: no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Dr. Mohamed Bouattour, Department of Hepatology, Beaujon University Hospital (AP-HP - Paris 7 Diderot), 100 Boulevard du Général Leclerc, 92110 Clichy, France. mohamed.bouattour@aphp.fr
Telephone: +33-1-40875525 Fax: +33-1-40875487
Received: December 10, 2014
Peer-review started: December 10, 2014
First decision: February 7, 2015
Revised: May 16, 2015
Accepted: August 30, 2015
Article in press: August 31, 2015
Published online: September 18, 2015
Abstract

Many years after therapeutic wilderness, sorafenib finally showed a clinical benefit in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma. After the primary general enthusiasm worldwide, some disappointments emerged particularly since no new treatment could exceed or at least match sorafenib in this setting. Without these new drugs, research focused on optimizing care of patients treated with sorafenib. One challenging research approach deals with identifying prognostic and predictive biomarkers of sorafenib in this population. The task still seems difficult; however appropriate investigations could resolve this dilemma, as observed for some malignancies where other drugs were used.

Keywords: Hepatocellular carcinoma, Antiangiogenic therapies, Sorafenib, Predictive biomarkers, Prognosis biomarkers, Functional imaging

Core tip: The approval of sorafenib in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma is based on the positive results of two large randomized phase III clinical trials. The inter- and intra-individual variability regarding tumor response and clinical outcome highlighted the unmet need of effective biomarkers of response. These biomarkers could be useful for monitoring treatment activity, detecting early resistance to treatment and identifying patients who would more likely benefit from treatment. An overview of prognostic/predictive biomarkers of sorafenib in hepatocellular carcinoma is discussed in this review.