HepatomiRNoma: The proposal of a new network of targets for diagnosis, prognosis and therapy in hepatocellular carcinoma

• To date many miRNAs are known to exert a role in cellular processes of liver carcinogenesis leading to tumor promotion (oncomir) or tumor suppression (anti-oncomir) respectively.
• miRNAs can be extracted from liver tumor tissue or blood samples of HCC patients so that some researchers supposed their role as diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers in hepatocellular carcinoma.
• The term HepatomiRNoma can be proposed to summarize all those miRNAs, which are related to HCC biology, diagnosis and prognosis.
• Some miRNAs have been explored as potential therapeutic target to improve and personalize HCC treatment.

The diagnosis and treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) underwent a huge advancement in the last years. Recently, microRNAs (miRNAs) have been also studied to provide a new tool for early diagnosis of high risk patients, for prognostic classification to identify those patients who benefit cancer treatment and for predictive definition to select the right targeted drug.In this review we revised all the available data obtained to explore the role of miRNAs in HCC. This analysis led to identification of miRNAs which could gain a diagnostic, prognostic or predictive role.The results of studies on miRNAs involved in HCC are initial and far from providing scientific evidences to translate into clinical practice. We propose a classification of these miRNAs, that we could name HepatomiRNoma as a whole. Anyway prospective studies have to be designed to clarify the real clinical impact of this new tool.