Immunologic Markers And The Progression Of Liver Disease In Hcv-Positive Individuals.

Abstract Background: Host immune response and chronic inflammation associated with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection play a key role in the progression of liver disease from cirrhosis to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). We evaluated a large panel of circulating immunologic markers to better understand the natural history of HCV-related liver disease. Methods: We sampled 94 HCC, 68 cirrhotic and 100 non-cirrhotic controls from a Taiwanese prospective cohort study of chronically HCV-infected individuals. Multivariable polytomous logistic regression and canonical discriminant analysis (CDA) were used to compare baseline plasma levels for 102 markers in individuals who developed cirrhosis as compared to controls and those who developed HCC. P-values for individual markers were corrected for multiple testing using a false discovery rate of 10%; a p-value<0.05 was used to determine significance in CDA. Receiver operating characteristic curves were used to compare the predictive ability of marker groups from both analyses. Results: After adjusting for age, sex, years of follow-up, serum alanine aminotransferase level, alcohol and smoking, DEFA-1 (p-trend: <0.0001), ITGAM (p-trend: <0.0001), CCL18 (p-trend: 0.002) and ARTN (p-trend: 0.003) were all found to be positively associated with the development of cirrhosis when compared to non-cirrhotic controls; the same four markers were shown to be associated with HCC when compared to cirrhotic participants. Taken together, these four markers predicted cirrhosis and HCC development with 79% and 88% accuracy, respectively in adjusted models. CDA models isolated a twelve-marker signature that included DEFA1, CCL18, and ARTN, improving predictability of cirrhosis development to 91% accuracy in adjusted models. Using the same methods, a fourteen-marker signature that included DEFA-1, ITGAM, CCL18 and ARTN was found to predict HCC development with 97% accuracy when compared to cirrhotic individuals in adjusted models. Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study to assess immunologic markers in relation to liver disease progression in individuals chronically infected with HCV. While further validation is required, these findings highlight the importance of immunologic processes in HCV-related disease. Citation Format: Ilona Argirion, Ruth M. Pfeiffer, Zhiwei Liu, Allan Hildesheim, Ligia Pinto, Katherine A. McGlynn, Jessica L. Petrick, Tram Kim Lam, Thomas R. O'Brien, Kelly Yu, Chien-jen Chen, Hwai-I Yang, Mei-Hsuan Lee, Jill Koshiol. Immunologic markers and the progression of liver disease in HCV-positive individuals [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2021; 2021 Apr 10-15 and May 17-21. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2021;81(13_Suppl):Abstract nr 836.