Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is among the top six major malignancies and the third highest cause of cancer related deaths around the world, accounting for approximately 80% of all liver cancer cases with approximately 500,000 new cases are diagnosed annually. With the advent of gene manipulation techniques and high-throughput sequencing technology, a large amount of data has been generated based on patient samples, animal models, and cell lines in vitro. Therefore, the ability to combine all of the bench and clinical studies to generate useful information and provide direction for future research on HCC would be valuable to explore the development of novel therapeutics to treat HCC.

The underlying mechanisms of HCC pathogenesis are still not fully understood, and effective treatment options are limited due to diagnosis occurring at later stages of the disease. Therefore, the ability to diagnose liver cancer at an earlier stage using reliable and specific biomarkers is important for successful treatment of the disease. In addition, HCC tumourigenesis is too complex to be fully explained by the alteration of some tumour driver or suppressor genes studied in one mouse model or cell line in vitro. Given these challenges, different liver cancer models in animals, as well as the development of specific biomarkers based on molecular mechanisms, which would allow for deep mining HCC development mechanisms.

The aim of this Special Issue is collate original research and review articles integrating bench and clinical work in HCC and exploring more effective treatment options, including new biomarkers, animal model, organoid model and patient data system analysis.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Liver cancer early diagnosis, including new techniques
• Biomarker development based on liver cancer models or patients samples
• Signal pathway and gene signature in liver cancer, including experimental and review progress
• Metastasis of liver cancers
• Different molecular classifications of liver cancer based on gene array data
• Immunotherapy in liver cancer