Bridge Treatments for HCC in the Waiting List for Liver Transplantation

During the past years, several therapeutic procedures have been proposed as bridging treatments in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma waiting for liver transplantation. Resective surgery, transarterial chemoembolization, radiofrequency thermal ablation and percutaneous ethanol injection are the most experienced, with the aim to decrease the rate of drop-out from LT waiting list, and the risk of HCC recurrence after transplant. Indeed, for patients within the Milan criteria, a time on waiting list exceeding 6-12 months is a known risk factor of tumor progression and drop out. For this reason, the application of bridging treatments in these patients might be reasonable and several studies in recent years have documented their usefulness to control tumor progression before the transplant. However, the favourable impact of these treatments on post-transplant patients' survival is still under investigation and the available studies provide controversial results. Bridging therapies have also been used for the downstaging of tumors exceeding the conventional "Milan criteria". Some recent data regarding multimodal sequential therapies seem to report promising results in terms of overall and disease-free survival of treated patients attaining effective downstaging before transplant.