Exploring the Evolving Treatment Landscape for Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Andrew X. Zhu, MD, PhD, professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and director of Liver Cancer Research at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, discusses the evolving treatment landscape for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).

For patients with advanced HCC, sorafenib (Nexavar) dominated the field for many years, according to Zhu. The multi-targeted tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) lenvatinib (Lenvima) later joined the field as an alternative single-agent treatment option for patients with advanced HCC. This provided a second option for the frontline setting, and for a long time, clinical trials were unable to demonstrate better activity with other agents or regimens than single-agent sorafenib.

The combination of atezolizumab (Tecentriq) plus bevacizumab (Avastin) was able to demonstrate superiority compared with sorafenib in terms of overall survival more recently, and the combination received approval in May 2020.