AACR 2026 | Early detection strategies for HCC in metabolic disease populations

So yes, indeed. So this is a major question right now. So if we are considering so patients with advanced HCC right now, the first line treatment is immunotherapy, as you just said. And so now we have the possibility to use different combinations of treatments, atezolizumab, bevacizumab, for example, using anti-VEGF, but also a combination of double immunotherapy. And so right now, one of the big questions is to identify this patient who would respond more to one or the other treatment. And unfortunately, for the moment, we don’t have so many data. And one of the reasons is because we are a bit late compared to other cancers such as melanoma or lung cancer, for example, where you are used to perform biopsy. So you have, you know, tumor material. And so a lot of studies were performed and now it’s more easy to identify these patients who would respond. But unfortunately, in the setting of HCC, we don’t have so many data regarding this because it’s one of the only cancers that you don’t need to perform a biopsy systematically. You can just use imaging. So for the moment, unfortunately, we know that we have this different approach that we can propose as first line, but we don’t have really clear predictors of response to say which treatment is the best for the patient. However, what is really interesting and what we are doing right now in France is that we are trying to biopsy more and more the patients and we have a specific program which is called France Genomique and here you can, so you do your biopsy and after you have like a whole sequencing of the tumor with the idea of identifying specific mutations and to propose then a specific drug dedicated to this mutation that we found. And using, for example, other drugs that are not usually used for HCC but can be used for melanoma or breast cancer or whatever you want. And so this is what we are trying to do right now for the majority of our patients in France, especially in my center, so when they progress after first line immunotherapy we perform the biopsy and we do this protocol and if we identify a specific mutation then we discuss in a molecular tumor board and we propose um we propose a specific drug um and we see what is going on. So right now it’s still at the level of research, but we are starting to have data that I will also present during our RCR meeting that are really interesting because we can see that if you use a drug specifically dedicated to this mutation, this allows to increase survival for the patient. So this is a new approach that we are trying to develop, like doing really personalized medicine for this patient with HCC.

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