Dissecting early relapse in liver cancer, one cell at a time.

In a recent issue of Cell, Sun Y, Wu L, Zhong Y, et al. Single-cell landscape of the ecosystem in early-relapse hepatocellular carcinoma. Cell 2021;184:404-421 e416, performed single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) to study the underlying mechanisms associated with the recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and address this unmet clinical need (1). The analysis included tumors from 12 treatment-naive primary liver cancer patients, 6 early-relapsed patients, and 4 patients with paired primary and early-relapsed tumors.