Global Analysis of Proteomics for Discovery of Biomarkers in Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) is a most lethal malignancy. At first presentation, patients often already have advanced disease, and their treatment options for cure are very limited. Measurable biomarkers for early diagnosis of HCC are urgently needed to prolong the median over-all survival rate and reduce therapeutic expenditures. Proteomics is a powerful analytical technique that has been widely applied to search for cancer biomarkers, including in HCC. High-sensitivity, high-throughput, and non-invasive technologies should be capable of contributing to early diagnosis of HCC. In this review, we provide a flow scheme for proteomic study in HCC, and an overview of technical approaches for protein quantification. In addition, we present a broad summary of the HCC biomarkers proposed by studies in recent years, which have used various quantitative proteomic approaches.