Hepatocellular carcinoma is a malignant tumor that occurs in the liver and is often difficult to detect because the early symptoms are not obvious, and when symptoms are present in the hospital, they are often advanced.
Targeted therapy is a new treatment option for liver cancer in recent years, which can target specific targets on cancer cells and target cancer foci without harming normal cells, with less toxic side effects than radiation and chemotherapy, without symptoms such as hair loss, bone marrow suppression, immune system decline, nausea and vomiting, and improving patients’ quality of life.
There are two main classes of targeted drugs: monoclonal antibodies that act mainly in the extracellular region of EGFR, inactivating the receptor by competitively inhibiting the binding of ligands to EGFR; and small compounds that enter the cell and act directly on the intracellular region of EGFR, interfering with adenosine triphosphate binding and inhibiting tyrosine kinase activity.
Targeted drugs are effective in treating liver cancer, but sometimes targeting a particular target is often not enough to contain tumor progression. Therefore, not all liver cancer patients are very sensitive to targeted drugs, so the use of targeted drugs for advanced liver cancer patients may vary from person to person.