Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common causes of cancer-related death worldwide. Liver cancer is generally related to hepatitis B or C infection and cirrhosis. Usually, patients with HCC are asymptomatic and are diagnosed at late stages when surgical treatment is no longer suitable. Limited treatment options for patients with advanced HCC are a major concern. Therefore, there is an urge for finding novel therapies to treat HCC. Liver cancer is highly heterogeneous and involved deregulation of several signaling pathways. Wnt/β-catenin pathway is frequently upregulated in HCC and it is implicated in maintenance of tumor initiating cells, drug resistance, tumor progression, and metastasis. A great effort in developing selective drugs to target components of the β-catenin pathway with anticancer activity is underway but only a few of them have reached phase I clinical trials. We aim to review the role of β-catenin pathway on hepatocarcinogenesis and liver cancer stem cell maintenance. We also evaluated the use of small molecules targeting the Wnt/β-catenin pathway with potential application for treatment of HCC.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-14-2016

Notes/Citation Information

Published in World Journal of Gastroenterology, v. 22, issue 2, p. 823-832.

© 2016 Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.

This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.3748/wjg.v22.i2.823

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