Risk Factors, Prognosis, and Potential Chemoprevention Drugs in Patients With Recurrent Hepatocellular Carcinoma After Curative Surgeries: a Nationwide Retrospective Cohort Study and a Multi-center Prospective Cohort Analysis

Backgrounds: Surgeries are the mainstream of curative therapies for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, high risk of recurrent HCC after liver surgeries is still the unsolved clinical issue (early recurrence 21% per year; late recurrence 18% per year). Early recurrence mainly result from disseminated HCC; by contrast, late recurrence usually originate from carcinogenic microenvironment. Currently, no large-scale nationwide studies that integrate laboratory date and clinical information was performed to investigate risk factors and prognosis of post-operative recurrent HCC. Besides, owing to economic issue, few companies would initiate pharmacologic studies to investigate chemoprevention agents for HCC. Furthermore, few biomarkers were discovered from Taiwanese HCC cohort to predict post-operative tumor recurrence because of no standardized cooperative platforms to share biological tissue and clinical information. Therefore, we wish to utilize a nationwide retrospective cohort from integrated national health insurance database (NHIRD) and a prospective multi-center clinical cohort study to address aforementioned issues.

Aims:

1. Investigate risk factors and prognosis of post-operative recurrent HCC in Taiwanese cohort
2. Discover chemoprevention targets from generic drugs to reduce risk of post-operative recurrent HCC
3. Determine biomarkers from Taiwanese cohort in prediction of post-operative recurrent HCC