Clinical utility of a simple primary culture method in hepatocellular carcinoma patients
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Published on: February 19, 2019
Zu-Yau Lin1, Chun-Chieh Wu, Yen-Hwang Chuang
1Cancer Center and Division of Hepatobiliary Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University Hospital, Kaohsiung, Taiwan; Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, College of Medicine, Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan.
Background And Aim:
The clinical utility of our designed primary culture method in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma was investigated.
Methods:
Specimens obtained from ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration of 108 hepatocellular carcinoma patients were cultured. The associations of the cellular proliferative speeds with cancer invasiveness and 1-year survivals were analyzed.
Results:
Successful cultures were achieved in 105 patients (97.2%). Ten hepatocellular carcinoma and nine cancer-associated fibroblast cell lines were established. The cells obtained from patients with American Joint Committee on Cancer TNM staging ≥ IIIB upon entering the study had higher proportion of rapidly proliferative cancer cells than those from patients with staging ≤ IIIA (P < 0.005). For Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer classification A or B patients receiving palliative transcatheter chemoembolization, patients with rapidly proliferative cancer-associated fibroblasts showed higher incidence of cancer-related death than patients with other proliferative patterns (P = 0.0385). The influence of the presence of rapidly proliferative cancer cells on survivals in this group could not be calculated due to a very small number of this kind of patients (9.5%). For Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer classification C patients receiving non-curative treatment, the incidence of rapidly proliferative cancer cells was 45.2%. Patients with rapidly proliferative cancer cells showed higher incidence of cancer-related death than patients with other proliferative patterns in patients receiving chemoembolization (P = 0.0452) and in patients receiving conservative treatment (P = 0.0206).
Conclusion:
Our method can provide cells from individual patient for researches and predict outcomes in patients receiving non-curative treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma.
