By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, June 12 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers have found a gene they say can help identify patients facing aggressive liver cancer, and may prove key to their future treatment.

This is good news in a field "that has not had big advances before this and has not been the beneficiary of genomic medicine," said Dr. Richard Goldberg, a professor of medicine at the Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The new laboratory study focused on hepatocellular carcinoma, a type of cancer that originates in the liver, particularly in people who have sustained liver damage from diseases such as hepatitis or cirrhosis, said Goldberg, who was not involved in the research. The findings open the possibility of targeted drugs that would outperform the standard drug treatment in use now, he said.

Some patients with hepatocellular carcinoma -- the most common form of liver cancer -- appear to have overactivity of a gene that is most often linked to embryonic stem cells and early human development, according to the study, published June 13 in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Those patients had a worse prognosis than other patients with hepatocellular carcinoma, wrote the lead authors from the National University of Singapore.

Further, blocking the gene -- called SALL4 -- appeared to help stop the cancer's spread, the researchers said.

Dr. Snorri Thorgeirsson, chief of the Laboratory of Experimental Carcinogenesis with the Center for Cancer Research at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, considers the new findings significant. "They found that if they inhibited SALL4, they were able to slow the growth of the cancer quite drastically," said Thorgeirsson. "They did this in lab cultures and in animal testing. It's pretty impressive they were able to show this."

Liver cancer is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths globally. More than 700,000 people are diagnosed with liver cancer each year throughout the world, and it accounts for more than 600,000 deaths annually, according to the American Cancer Society. Overall, the five-year survival rate from liver cancer is about 15 percent.

SALL4 has previously been linked to leukemia and other types of cancer, according to the study authors.

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Scientists ID Gene Linked to Aggressive Liver Cancer

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