Experts Urge Greater Awareness and Support as Liver Cancer Month Ends

As Liver Cancer Awareness Month concludes, we are reflecting on insights shared Dr. Arndt Vogel and Dr. Mark Yarchoan who emphasized the urgent need for increased recognition and support for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Together, these perspectives reinforce that increased awareness, surveillance, and sustained investment can meaningfully improve outcomes for patients with liver cancer.

Vogel serves as a managing senior consultant and professor in the Department of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Endocrinology at Hannover Medical School, in Hanover, Germany, where he is also the head of the GI-Cancer Center and also directs the Center for Personalized Medicine at the institution.

Yarchoan is a physician-scientist and an associate professor of oncology. He is a Johns Hopkins physician and a member of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine faculty, in Baltimore, where he leads a research laboratory and is the principal investigator of multiple clinical trials focused on hepatobiliary cancers.

Transcript

What is the importance of recognizing Liver Cancer Awareness Month, and other initiatives like it?

Yarchoan: Liver cancer is a super under-recognized cause of cancer death in America. It's grossly underfunded. When you look at government funding for different cancers, liver cancer is the third leading cause of cancer death, but it's number 12 in funding; it's a grossly underfunded cancer.

The thing that I think is really worth pointing out is that things are actually starting to work for liver cancer. it's an area where we really need more attention, more advocacy and more money to advance new treatments. I love that this is being highlighted. Our patients are, at the end of the day, our best advocates. I really hope that our patients can help us get the attention and the resources we need to continue to make great progress. This is a really hard time right now, as someone who spends most of my life doing research, to keep our laboratories open and to try to make the kinds of advancements that we want to make in this field. I think there's no better place to start than raising awareness about this cancer.

This is a huge cause of morbidity and mortality around the world, not just in the United States. Unfortunately, in the past, outcomes were so poor for liver cancer that often patients just didn't have time to even raise awareness about this. We had such low cure rates that we didn't have the kinds of patient advocates that other cancers had. That's starting to change, and I really feel that even in this program.

Vogel: I think raising awareness for liver cancer is today, as it was 50 years ago, very important because the majority of our patients have underlying risk factors. HCC usually occurs in the context of a chronic liver disease. In the past, this was a lot of viral disease for which we have today very effective treatments available for hepatitis B and C. Nevertheless, these patients are still at risk. Then we have the new diseases, the fatty liver diseases, both caused by metabolic syndrome and obesity or by alcohol abuse.

I think in most cases, we can identify patients at risk, and if we were to use our surveillance strategies more efficiently (at the moment, only around 25% to 30% of our patients, or potential patients, use surveillance strategies) we could definitely increase the number of patients that are diagnosed in an early stage. With that, they would be candidates for potentially curative treatment. So, I think raising awareness equals utilizing surveillance more and more effectively, and that would definitely make a tremendous impact on the survival rates, which are really extremely poor still for this disease.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

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