Detection of hepatitis-B virus-DNA at high-frequency in liver neoplasias using a PCR technique

Hepatocellular carcinoma is the most frequent liver cancer and hepatitis B virus is included among the risk factors for the development of this type of neoplasia. Direct detection of this virus is difficult due to the lack of a simple tissue culture system for growing the virus. Amplification of HBV nucleic acid sequences with the Polymerase Chain Reaction technique leads to the direct detection of the virus, but involves several critical steps and it is prone to false positive results due to inter sample contaminations. We overcame these shortcomings by using a simple boiling method for extracting DNA from histological slides of tissues coupled with double ('nested') PCR amplification. In this study we evaluated the frequency of presence of HBV nucleic acid sequences in samples of neoplastic liver tissues from patients in Greece. We studied 20 DNA samples from hepatocellular carcinomas and we found 11 positive for HBV DNA and 8 DNA samples from hepatoblastomas and we found 3 positive for the viral DNA.