Post-hepatitis C and post-alcoholism hepatocellular carcinomas: series 3

The aim of this study is to compare post-Hepatitis C (HCV) and post-Alcoholism (ALC) Hepatocellular Carcinoma gene expression profiling. Owing to transcriptome analysis with a cDNA array virtually covering every transcript in liver, we compared tumors vs paired cirrhosis or tumors vs controls as a function of etiology, i.e. alcoholism (ALC) vs hepatitis C virus (HCV). The so-called Significance Analysis of Microarray was used to identify those genes with the most informative changes in transcript levels. Comparisons of tumor/cirrhosis ratios or tumor/controls ratios between 12 alcoholic vs 10 HCV patients identified a total of 31 transcripts whose altered ratios appropriately clustered the patients according to etiology. Keywords: etiology analysis The tumoral (TU) part and paired-cirrhosis (CIR) taken away from tumor were analyzed for 22 patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (Pat1-22). Five controls (Control1-5) have been included. All data in the current study were obtained from 3 separate hybridizations per RNA sample (except for Control4-5 : 2 replicates).