Progress on the discovery of new functional targets for hepatocellular carcinoma and development of advanced techniques for its targeted diagnosis and therapy

<p indent="0mm">Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the most common primary liver cancer, which develops in a chronic inflammatory environment of the liver, and is closely related to viral hepatitis infection or exposure to harmful environmental factors such as alcohol or aflatoxins. This article reviews the clinical status of HCC in Chinese population, discusses the existing diagnosis and treatment strategies and their shortcomings, systematically summarizes the early and recent revealed signal transduction mechanisms of HCC cells, and highlights the following two types of cutting-edge techniques: (1) proteomics technology, mining new functional molecular targets; and (2) advanced diagnostic and therapeutic techniques targeting membrane proteins that are specifically expressed by HCC in order to provide new insights for the early and precise diagnosis and effective treatment of HCC.