Personalized therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma: Where are we now?

Highlights • A number of clinical trials which adopted strategy of ‘All-comer’ accrual failed to identify novel targeted treatment for treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). • Subgroup analyses of clinical trials suggested that several targeted agents had different efficacy in different population, of which the efficacy could be predicted by tissue biomarker or clinical parameters. • Recent advances in next generation sequencing have revealed high inter-patient heterogeneity in HCC in terms of deregulated signalling pathways and genetic mutations. • Above evidences indicate that enrichment strategy should be adopted for drug testing in HCC, and this could be paved by the advances in liquid biopsy and concepts of trial design..