A Randomized Controlled Study on the Effect of Postoperative Adjuvant Chemotherapy With FOLFOX4 After Hepatocarcinoma Resection Based on Folate Receptor-positive Circulating Tumor Cells

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the third leading cause of cancer death globally. Hepatectomy remains the most widely practiced radical treatment for HCC despite having a high associated recurrence rate, approximately 70% at 5 years after surgery, which often hampers further improvement in survival for these patients. And until now although a lot of different adjuvant therapies had been tried in the clinic, but their role in preventing recurrence remain controversial. As a research of a phase Ⅲ randomize study showed that FOLFOX4 (infusional fluorouracil [FU], leucovorin[LV], and OXA) served as palliative chemotherapy can induce higher overall survival, progression-free survival and response rate comparing to doxorubicin in patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma from Asia. The safety data was also acceptable. The chemotherapy of FOLFOX has been accepted by many guidelines and recommended for systematic treatment of advanced HCC. However, the effect of this systemic chemotherapy for recurrent HCC after partial hepatectomy remains to be investigated.

Circulating tumor cells (CTC) have played an important role in early diagnosis of tumors, monitoring of recurrence and metastasis, judgment of patient prognosis, and guidance of postoperative adjuvant treatment. CTC counts can be used to assist diagnosis and evaluation of postoperative prognosis. Previous studies have also shown that folate receptors (FR) are highly expressed in HCC. The detection of circulating tumor cells based on folate receptor (FR+CTC) has been proved to be a sensitive and effective method for detecting CTC.

Patients with HCC who received curative liver resection and with the preoperative FR+CTC level higher than 18.4FU/3mL were randomly assigned 1:1 by the doctors to receive placebo(control group) or FOLFOX4 (treatment group). All patients in the treatment group received FOLFOX4 at most 12 cycles beginning from the 4th week after liver resection. The outcomes of patients were evaluated during the 3-years follow up.