Chalasani NP, Porter K, Bhattacharya A, et al. - The early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) detection may be significantly improved by the multi-target HCC blood test (mt-HBT) for patients undergoing HCC surveillance, a critical step to increasing curative treatment opportunities and reducing mortality.

• In algorithm development, the mt-HBT demonstrated 72% sensitivity for early-stage HCC at 88% specificity, with 136 HCC cases (60% early-stage) and 404 controls.

• According to the findings, test performance was confirmed in an independent cohort of 156 HCC cases (50% early-stage) and 245 controls, demonstrating 88% overall sensitivity, 82% early-stage sensitivity, and 87% specificity.

• Although α-fetoprotein (AFP) and GALAD at these cutoffs had higher specificities (100% and 93%, respectively), it was shown that the early-stage sensitivity in clinical validation was significantly higher than AFP ≥ 20 ng/mL (40%; P < 0.0001) and GALAD ≥-0.63 (71%; P = 0.03).