Hepatocellular Carcinoma & Hypoxia: A Review

Liver is the largest gland inside our body, and it is accounted for many functions in the body but like any other organ in the body it is prone to different disease but the most dangerous one of them is hepatocellular carcinoma. Hepatocellular carcinoma is fetal, and it is having low survival rate and it is resistant to the most of the know therapy that’s why there is always a need for new treatment modalities. It has different causative agents, different staging methods, different mechanism for hepatocarcinogenesis and different treatment modalities like liver resection, liver transplantation and sorafenib. Tumor hypoxia is a common feature of hepatocellular carcinoma and other solid tumours, and it results from a lack of blood supply to the rapidly expanding cancer cells. Tumor hypoxia is an unfavourable prognosis factor since it enhances the tumor's aggressiveness and resistance to treatment, which is why reducing tumour hypoxia has a lot of therapeutic benefits for cancer patients. Drug resistance, metastasis, angiogenesis, metabolic shifting, radiotherapy resistance, and overall tumour aggressiveness and poor prognosis are all caused by hypoxia inducible factor 1, which causes drug resistance, metastasis, angiogenesis, metabolic shifting, radiotherapy resistance, and overall tumour aggressiveness and poor prognosis. There is keen research working on the tumor hypoxia and trying to discover new drugs and approaches to correct the tumor hypoxia like prodrugs activated by hypoxia, hyperbaric oxygen, nanoparticles, oral oxygen therapy and finally hypoxia inducible factors inhibitors like for example benzopyranyl 1,2,3-triazole, glyceollins and vorinostat.