Research Progress in Immune Microenvironment and Therapy of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the sixth most common cancer worldwide, with an extremely poor prognosis.Current treatment methods of HCC include surgical resection, liver transplantation, radiofrequency ablation, and transcatheter arterial chemoembolization. However, these treatment schemes have little effect on patients with advanced hepatoma. Although recent chemotherapies targeting cell proliferation, metastasis, and angiogenesis are encouraging in patients with advanced HCC, the overall outcome is still not satisfactory. It is worth noting that the effectiveness of chemotherapy, targeted therapy, and immunotherapy in HCC treatment is closely related to patient's primary or post-treatment (secondary) tissue immune microenvironment. This review summarizes recent progress in the regulation and function of immune microenvironment in HCC, introduces recent clinical therapeutic strategies of liver cancer with focus on the impact of current treatment strategies on local tumor immune microenvironment, and further discusses the inspiration of current preclinical research on follow-up new treatment strategies for liver cancer.