Primary hepatocellular carcinoma (HGC) often invades into vessels and has a distal metastasis at an early stage, which have less curable options and a poor prognosis. The metastasis can be found early by identification and isolation of circulating tumor cells (CTC) in the bloodstream. Therefore, the detection of CTC in patients with HCC is beneficial to evaluate the curative effect and block the metastasis, despite the fact that the markers used for the detection of CTC( such as EpCAM and AFP etal ) are overlapped with these for cancer stem cells (CSC). Moreover, CTC number is small in the bloodstream, thus, more sensitive and specific markers and techniques to test the CTC are needed to detect and isolate these cells.%在原发性肝癌的早期阶段,癌细胞就可侵入血管、形成远处转移,致使患者失去有效治疗机会、预后不良.如果在转移性病灶形成之前能够在血液中发现循环肿瘤细胞(CTC),则可早期发现转移倾向.因而,能否有效地检测出肝瘤CTC对判断治疗效果乃至阻断转移发生均有重要价值.目前用于检测肝癌CTC的分子标记物(如EpCAM、AFP等)在肝癌干细胞(CSC)也有表达,而且肝癌CTC在血液中数量极少,所以发现更加特异、敏感的CTC分子标记物以及开发更加高效的CTC检测技术对于提高肝癌CTC 的临床应用价值具有重要意义.
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