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Kopystecka A, Patryn R, Leśniewska M, Budzyńska J, Kozioł I. The Use of ctDNA in the Diagnosis and Monitoring of Hepatocellular Carcinoma-Literature Review. Int J Mol Sci 2023; 24:ijms24119342. [PMID: 37298294 DOI: 10.3390/ijms24119342] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/18/2023] [Revised: 05/18/2023] [Accepted: 05/25/2023] [Indexed: 06/12/2023] Open
Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver cancer and is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Despite advances in medicine, it is still a cancer with a very poor prognosis. Both imaging and liver biopsy still have important limitations, especially in very small nodules and those which show atypical imaging features. In recent years, liquid biopsy and molecular analysis of tumor breakdown products have become an attractive source of new biomarkers. Patients with liver and biliary malignancies, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), may greatly benefit from ctDNA testing. These patients are often diagnosed at an advanced stage of the disease, and relapses are common. Molecular analysis may indicate the best cancer treatment tailored to particular patients with specific tumor DNA mutations. Liquid biopsy is a minimally invasive technique that facilitates the early detection of cancer. This review summarizes the knowledge of ctDNA in liquid biopsy as an indicator for early diagnosis and monitoring of hepatocellular cancer.
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Affiliation(s)
- Agnieszka Kopystecka
- Students' Scientific Circle on Medical Law, Department of Humanities and Social Medicine, Medical University of Lublin, 20-093 Lublin, Poland
| | - Rafał Patryn
- Department of Humanities and Social Medicine, Medical University of Lublin, 20-093 Lublin, Poland
| | - Magdalena Leśniewska
- Students' Scientific Circle on Medical Law, Department of Humanities and Social Medicine, Medical University of Lublin, 20-093 Lublin, Poland
| | - Julia Budzyńska
- Students' Scientific Circle on Medical Law, Department of Humanities and Social Medicine, Medical University of Lublin, 20-093 Lublin, Poland
| | - Ilona Kozioł
- Students' Scientific Circle on Medical Law, Department of Humanities and Social Medicine, Medical University of Lublin, 20-093 Lublin, Poland
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Labgaa I. Editorial: The impact of liquid biopsies in the management of liver cancer. Front Oncol 2022; 12:1083355. [DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2022.1083355] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/28/2022] [Accepted: 11/17/2022] [Indexed: 11/30/2022] Open
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Safrastyan A, Wollny D. Network analysis of hepatocellular carcinoma liquid biopsies augmented by single-cell sequencing data. Front Genet 2022; 13:921195. [PMID: 36092896 PMCID: PMC9452847 DOI: 10.3389/fgene.2022.921195] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/15/2022] [Accepted: 06/30/2022] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
Liquid biopsy, the analysis of body fluids, represents a promising approach for disease diagnosis and prognosis with minimal intervention. Sequencing cell-free RNA derived from liquid biopsies has been very promising for the diagnosis of several diseases. Cancer research, in particular, has emerged as a prominent candidate since early diagnosis has been shown to be a critical determinant of disease prognosis. Although high-throughput analysis of liquid biopsies has uncovered many differentially expressed genes in the context of cancer, the functional connection between these genes is not investigated in depth. An important approach to remedy this issue is the construction of gene networks which describes the correlation patterns between different genes, thereby allowing to infer their functional organization. In this study, we aimed at characterizing extracellular transcriptome gene networks of hepatocellular carcinoma patients compared to healthy controls. Our analysis revealed a number of genes previously associated with hepatocellular carcinoma and uncovered their association network in the blood. Our study thus demonstrates the feasibility of performing gene co-expression network analysis from cell-free RNA data and its utility in studying hepatocellular carcinoma. Furthermore, we augmented cell-free RNA network analysis with single-cell RNA sequencing data which enables the contextualization of the identified network modules with cell-type specific transcriptomes from the liver.
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Affiliation(s)
- Aram Safrastyan
- RNA Bioinformatics and High Throughput Analysis, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany
- Leibniz Institute on Aging-Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI), Jena, Germany
| | - Damian Wollny
- RNA Bioinformatics and High Throughput Analysis, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany
- Leibniz Institute on Aging-Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI), Jena, Germany
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
- *Correspondence: Damian Wollny,
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Gonvers S, Tabrizian P, Melloul E, Dormond O, Schwartz M, Demartines N, Labgaa I. Is liquid biopsy the future commutator of decision-making in liver transplantation for hepatocellular carcinoma? Front Oncol 2022; 12:940473. [PMID: 36033451 PMCID: PMC9402935 DOI: 10.3389/fonc.2022.940473] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/10/2022] [Accepted: 07/04/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Liver transplant (LT) is the most favorable treatment option for patients with early stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Numerous attempts have been pursued to establish eligibility criteria and select HCC patients for LT, leading to various systems that essentially integrate clinico-morphological variables. Lacking of sufficient granularity to recapitulate the biological complexity of the disease, all these alternatives display substantial limitations and are thus undeniably imperfect. Liquid biopsy, defined as the molecular analysis of circulating analytes released by a cancer into the bloodstream, was revealed as an incomparable tool in the management of cancers, including HCC. It appears as an ideal candidate to refine selection criteria of LT in HCC. The present comprehensive review analyzed the available literature on this topic. Data in the field, however, remain scarce with only 17 studies. Although rare, these studies provided important and encouraging findings highlighting notable prognostic values and supporting the contribution of liquid biopsy in this specific clinical scenario. These results underpinned the critical and urgent need to intensify and accelerate research on liquid biopsy, in order to determine whether and how liquid biopsy may be integrated in the decision-making of LT in HCC.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stéphanie Gonvers
- Department of Visceral Surgery, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland
| | - Parissa Tabrizian
- Recanati Miller Transplant Institute, The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, NY, United States
- Mount Sinai Liver Cancer Program, Division of Liver Diseases, Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States
| | - Emmanuel Melloul
- Department of Visceral Surgery, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland
| | - Olivier Dormond
- Department of Visceral Surgery, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland
| | - Myron Schwartz
- Recanati Miller Transplant Institute, The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, NY, United States
- Mount Sinai Liver Cancer Program, Division of Liver Diseases, Tisch Cancer Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, United States
| | - Nicolas Demartines
- Department of Visceral Surgery, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland
| | - Ismail Labgaa
- Department of Visceral Surgery, Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), University of Lausanne (UNIL), Lausanne, Switzerland
- *Correspondence: Ismail Labgaa,
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Li CL, Yeh SH, Chen PJ. Circulating Virus–Host Chimera DNAs in the Clinical Monitoring of Virus-Related Cancers. Cancers (Basel) 2022; 14:cancers14102531. [PMID: 35626135 PMCID: PMC9139492 DOI: 10.3390/cancers14102531] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/18/2022] [Revised: 05/18/2022] [Accepted: 05/18/2022] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
Simple Summary Cell-free tumor DNA (ctDNA), the DNA released into circulation from tumors, is a promising tumor marker with versatile applications. The associations of the amount, somatic mutation frequency, and epigenetic modifications of ctDNA with the tumor burden, tumor behavior, and prognosis have been widely investigated in different types of tumors. However, there are still some challenging issues to be resolved before ctDNA can complement or even replace current serum tumor markers. We propose employing exogenous viral DNA integration that produces unique virus–host chimera DNA (vh-DNA) at junction sites. Cell-free vh-DNA may become a new biomarker because it overcomes background interference detection problems, takes advantage of virus tropism to localize the tumor, and acts as a universal marker for monitoring clonal expansion or tumor loads in tumors related to oncogenic viruses. Abstract The idea of using tumor-specific cell-free DNA (ctDNA) as a tumor biomarker has been widely tested and validated in various types of human cancers and different clinical settings. ctDNA can reflect the presence or size of tumors in a real-time manner and can enable longitudinal monitoring with minimal invasiveness, allowing it to be applied in treatment response assessment and recurrence monitoring for cancer therapies. However, tumor detection by ctDNA remains a great challenge due to the difficulty in enriching ctDNA from a large amount of homologous non-tumor cell-free DNA (cfDNA). Only ctDNA with nonhuman sequences (or rearrangements) can be selected from the background of cfDNA from nontumor DNAs. This is possible for several virus-related cancers, such as hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related HCC or human papillomavirus (HPV)-related cervical or head and neck cancers, which frequently harbor randomly integrated viral DNA. The junction fragments of the integrations, namely virus–host chimera DNA (vh-DNA), can represent the signatures of individual tumors and are released into the blood. Such ctDNA can be enriched by capture with virus-specific probes and therefore exploited as a circulating biomarker to track virus-related cancers in clinical settings. Here, we review virus integrations in virus-related cancers to evaluate the feasibility of vh-DNA as a cell-free tumor marker and update studies on the development of detection and applications. vh-DNA may be a solution to the development of specific markers to manage virus-related cancers in the future.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chiao-Ling Li
- Graduate Institute of Microbiology, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan;
| | - Shiou-Hwei Yeh
- Graduate Institute of Microbiology, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan;
- Center for Genomic Medicine, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan
- Department of Clinical Laboratory Sciences and Medical Biotechnology, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan
- Correspondence: (S.-H.Y.); (P.-J.C.)
| | - Pei-Jer Chen
- Center for Genomic Medicine, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan
- Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei 100, Taiwan
- Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Internal Medicine, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei 100, Taiwan
- Correspondence: (S.-H.Y.); (P.-J.C.)
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Basic Science with Preclinical Models to Investigate and Develop Liquid Biopsy: What Are the Available Data and Is It a Fruitful Approach? Int J Mol Sci 2022; 23:ijms23105343. [PMID: 35628154 PMCID: PMC9141279 DOI: 10.3390/ijms23105343] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/31/2022] [Revised: 05/04/2022] [Accepted: 05/06/2022] [Indexed: 12/14/2022] Open
Abstract
The molecular analysis of circulating analytes (circulating tumor-DNA (ctDNA), -cells (CTCs) and -RNA (ctRNA)/exosomes) deriving from solid tumors and detected in the bloodstream—referred as liquid biopsy—has emerged as one of the most promising concepts in cancer management. Compelling data have evidenced its pivotal contribution and unique polyvalence through multiple applications. These data essentially derived from translational research. Therewith, data on liquid biopsy in basic research with preclinical models are scarce, a concerning lack that has been widely acknowledged in the field. This report aimed to comprehensively review the available data on the topic, for each analyte. Only 17, 17 and 2 studies in basic research investigated ctDNA, CTCs and ctRNA/exosomes, respectively. Albeit rare, these studies displayed noteworthy relevance, demonstrating the capacity to investigate questions related to the biology underlying analytes release that could not be explored via translational research with human samples. Translational, clinical and technological sectors of liquid biopsy may benefit from basic research and should take note of some important findings generated by these studies. Overall, results underscored the need to intensify the efforts to conduct future studies on liquid biopsy in basic research with new preclinical models.
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