Primary liver cancer (PLC) is a common malignancy, and approximately 80% of PLC cases are hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Without any treatment, HCC would have a very poor prognosis with a median survival of 3 to 6 months. Surgical resection and liver transplantation should be the first choice in the therapy of HCC. However, it is difficult to detect HCC in an early stage for its clinical manifestations are highly nonspecific; and in patients with terminal HCC, if good chance of surgery missed, their prognosis would have been extremely bad; even in patients who have received curative resection, forty to sixty percent of patients would have recurrences five years after surgery. The occurrence of tumor metastasis and high recurrence rate would yield disappointing results in HCC patients. Therefore, novel strategies to prevent recurrences and metastasis after hepatic resection are urgently needed.
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