Published online Aug 14, 2019. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v25.i30.4199
Peer-review started: April 10, 2019
First decision: May 9, 2019
Revised: May 28, 2019
Accepted: July 2, 2019
Article in press: July 3, 2019
Published online: August 14, 2019
Processing time: 128 Days and 7.6 Hours
The huge prognostic difference between early and late stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a challenging diagnostic problem. Alpha-fetoprotein is the mostly widely used biomarker for HCC used in the clinic, however it’s sensitivity and specificity of is not optimal. The development and application of multiple biotechnologies, including next generation sequencing, multiple “omics” data, that include genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, metagenomics has been used for HCC diagnostic biomarker screening. Effective biomarkers/panels/models have been identified and validated at different clinical levels. A large proportion of these have a good diagnostic performance for HCC, especially for early HCC. In this article, we reviewed the various HCC biomarkers derived from “omics” data and discussed the advantages and disadvantages for diagnosis HCC.
Core tip: Compared to traditional biomarkers, high throughput technologies provide novel insights and mechanistic understanding of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In this article, recent genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomics, and metagenomics based HCC diagnostic biomarkers and their performance was evaluated. The advantages and disadvantages of these HCC diagnostic biomarkers are also discussed.