Highlights of This Issue

Disease recurrence after curative resection for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients remains the major cause for dismal outcome. Results from this large-sample prospective randomized controlled trial showed that adjuvant transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), along with adriamycin and lipiodol, can significantly reduce tumor recurrence, improve recurrence-free survival and overall survival for HBV-related HCC patients with an intermediate or high risk of HCC recurrence after curative liver resection. The data also suggests that adjuvant TACE decreases HCC recurrence after curative liver resection by eradicating pre-existing microscopic tumor foci that traditional imaging modalities fail to detect in the perioperative stage and is well tolerated.

In clinical practice, no validated biomarkers are currently available to predict the efficacy of pemetrexed plus platinum doublet chemotherapy for nonsquamous NSCLC patients. This study investigated the metabolic characteristics of 354 prechemotherapeutic serum samples and found tight associations between small metabolites and the responses of patients to this cytotoxic drug combination. An effective discriminant model was developed by employing a seven-metabolite panel, which can predict the efficacy of the chemotherapeutic regimens, prior to treatment, with a sensitivity of 90.8% and specificity of 79.5%. This serum-based biomarker study can be easily applied in clinical practice and personalize treatment decisions.

Successful implementation of HPV screening requires triage to distinguish transforming from benign HPV infections. Previous studies have shown associations of HPV DNA methylation with cervical precancer for some HPV types. In this study, Clarke and colleagues observed strong associations of increased methylation with precancer in all 12 carcinogenic HPV types, suggesting that DNA methylation is a general phenomenon in the transition from HPV infection to precancer. HPV methylation showed good risk stratification and better performance than current triage methods. A multi-type methylation assay may solve the current problem of how to manage HPV-positive women, in high- and low-resource settings.

The Cancer Genome Atlas data resources represent an opportunity to explore commonalities across 32 different cancer types involving multiple molecular levels. Chen and colleagues applied an alternative molecular classification approach to over 10,000 tumor samples to define ten major pan-cancer “classes” that transcended tissue or histology distinctions. Coordinate pathways and processes were revealed across these pan-cancer classes, and the influence of the tumor microenvironment was evident within distinct subsets of human tumors. One molecular class manifesting a differential expression profile of neuroendocrine tumors could have therapeutic implications for an appreciable subset of human cancers.