Docetaxel inhibits progression of human hepatoma cell line in vitro and is effective in advanced hepatocellular carcinoma.
BACKGROUND
Current chemotherapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is insufficient; only sorafenib has been proven to provide a modest survival benefit. A future direction of chemotherapy is to tailor treatment based on the chemosensitivity of each individual tumor. By doing so, only patients who stand to benefit from therapy will be exposed to potential side-effects and morbidity. Although the use of docetaxel (DTX) for the treatment of lung, breast and gastric cancer has been reported, there are few reports about its use in the setting of HCC.


METHODS
To examine the efficacy of DTX for HCC, we established a human hepatoma cell line (TK cell) from the patient's malignant ascites from peritoneal carcinomatosis and treated it with DTX in vitro.


RESULTS
After we confirmed the efficacy of DTX in vitro, we treated our patient with DTX with positive results.


CONCLUSIONS
In this study, we present a therapeutic approach by using DTX that supports the potential usefulness of personalized medicine in vitro and demonstrates it clinically.
Yata
Yutaka
Y
Third Department of Internal Medicine, University of Toyama, Toyama.
Xue
Feng
F
Takahara
Terumi
T
Kudo
Hiroshi
H
Hirano
Katsuharu
K
Yasumura
Satoshi
S
Minemura
Masami
M
Scanga
Andrew E
AE
Sugiyama
Toshiro
T