Met may be a promising¹ personalized treatment method for approximately 45 percent of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC肝细胞癌) who have c-Met-positive tumors, according to study results presented at the Fourth AACR International Conference on Molecular³ Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic⁴ Development. HCC is the most common primary malignant⁵（恶性的，有害的） tumor² of the liver; c-Met is a receptor for hepatocyte（肝细胞） growth factor that appears to drive liver cancer growth, invasion and metastasis（转移，新陈代谢） .

"Current therapies for HCC patients are ' one size fits all（一刀切，一体适用） .' We propose that molecular profiling will enable better therapy for HCC patients with a c-Met positive tumor," said Hanning You, M.D., Ph.D., postdoctoral fellow working in the laboratory of C. Bart Rountree, M.D., in the departments of pediatrics（小儿科） and pharmacology（药物学） , at the Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey, Pa.

Using a preclinical translational study to validate⁶ c-Met as a target for HCC, You and colleagues found c-Met was highly overexpressed in metastatic（转移性的） liver cancer cells.

"By targeting c-Met we were able to suppress tumor growth in vivo（在活体内） and kill these metastatic liver cancer cells," said You.

Since c-Met inhibitor stopped proliferation and tumor growth of metastatic HCC cells, the researchers concluded that c-Met might be a potential personalized target of metastatic HCC. In addition, they found that results of a separate meta-analysis of six studies and 1,051 patients showed that c-Met activation⁷ is associated with poor prognosis in HCC.