Wang Y, et al. - In view of challenges posed by early tumor recurrence following curative surgical resection to the clinical management of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), whole genome expression microarrays were conducted by researchers on 64 primary HCC tumors with clinically defined recurrence status, crossed referenced with RNA-seq data from 18 HCC tumors in the Cancer Genome Atlas project. They identified 11 close clusters by performing receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, evaluating the prognostic biomarker potential of 77 genes having a significant association with early recurrent (ER) HCC tumors as well as Pearson correlation analysis. Using reverse-transcription quantitative PCR, they selected the one gene with the best area under the ROC curve in each of the 11 clusters for validation in an independent cohort of 24 HCC tumors. They identified NUF2 to be the minimal biomarker adequate for discriminating early recurrent (ER) tumors from LR tumors. Results suggest that NUF2 in combination with liver cirrhosis significantly enhances ER tumor detection.