Selected patients with stage III/IV HCC can be downstaged to Milan criteria with TACE. Importantly, patients who are successfully downstaged and transplanted have excellent midterm disease-free and overall survival, similar to stage II HCC.

Meningiomasare common intracranial tumors but relatively little is known about the genetic events responsible for their clinical diversity. While recent genomic studies have provided clues, the genes identified often differ among publications. We used microarray expression profiling to identify genes that are differentially expressed, with at least a 4-fold change, between grade I and grade III meningiomas. We filtered this initial set of potential biomarkers through a second cohort of meningiomas and then verified the remaining genes by quantitative polymerase chain reaction followed by examination using a third microarray expression cohort. Using this approach, we identified 9 overexpressed (TPX2, RRM2, TOP2A, PI3, BIRC5, CDC2, NUSAP1, DLG7, SOX11) and 2 underexpressed (TIMP3, KCNMA1) genes in grade III vs. grade I meningiomas. As a further validation step, we analyzed these genes in a fourth cohort and found that patients with grade II meningiomas with high topoisomerase 2-α protein expression (greater than 5% labeling-index) had shorter times to death than patients with low expression. We believe that this multistep, multi-cohort approach provides a robust method for reducing false positives while generating a list of reproducible candidate genes that are associated with clinically aggressive meningioma and are suitable for analysis for their potential prognostic value.