Molecular classification of cancers has significantly improved patient outcomes through the implementation of treatment protocols tailored to the abnormalities present in each patient’s cancer cells. Important subtypes with characteristic molecular features as potential therapeutic targets are likely to exist for all tumor lineages, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but have yet to be discovered and validated as targets. Because each tumor accumulates hundreds or thousands of genomic and epigenetic alterations of critical genes, it is challenging to identify and validate candidate tumor aberrations as therapeutic targets or biomarkers that predict prognosis or response to therapy. Therefore, it is important to have good overview of our understanding on molecular and genomic subtypes of HCC. Systems-level integration of data from multiple studies and development of new technologies analyzing patient tissues hold great promise for the identification of novel therapeutic targets and linked predictive biomarkers, allowing implementation of personalized medicine for HCC patients.
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