肝癌是常见的恶性肿瘤之一,其5年生存率只有39%。目前肝癌的治疗方式包括手术切除、介入化疗、射频消融,以及靶向分子药物治疗等。肝癌是典型的富血管恶性肿瘤,可通过肿瘤血管生成抑制剂,抑制或破坏肝癌组织血管生成。但是,在治疗过程中发现血管生成抑制剂并不能完全阻断肝癌组织的营养供给,在肝癌组织中,另外存在着特殊的血液供应方式——血管生成拟态,细胞可以形成类似于血管的管道,肝癌组织通过这些管道与宿主血管相连通,进而为肝癌细胞的生长、侵袭和转移提供血供。越来越多的研究发现,血管生成拟态结构的存在,是限制血管生成抑制剂对肝癌治疗作用的关键因素之一。笔者主要综述血管拟态的发现、形成机制及其在肝癌治疗中的研究现状。
Hepatocellular carcinoma( HCC) is a common malignancy,of which the 5-year survival rate is 39% merely. HCC current treatments include surgery,interventional chemotherapy,radiofrequency ablation,and targeting drug delivery. As a typical hypervascular cancer,HCC can be inhibited via tumor angiogenesis inhibitors( TAI). However,TAI can not completely block the nutrient supply of the tumor tissue during treatment,since there exists a special way of blood supply named vascular mimicry( VM) in HCC.Through these pipes similar to the blood vessels HCC can communicate with the host blood vessels and thus acquire blood supply for the growth,invasion and metastasis. A growing number of studies have found that the presence of angiogenesis mimicry structure is one of the key factors limiting TAI in the treatment of liver cancer. This article gave an outline of VM and summarized the formation mechanism of VM and the research status about the hepatocarcinoma therapy.