Faezeh Hosseinzadeh - Department of Tissue Engineering and Applied Cell Sciences, School of Advanced Technologies in Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Javad Verdi - Department of Tissue Engineering and Applied Cell Sciences, School of Advanced Technologies in Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Jafar Ai - Department of Tissue Engineering and Applied Cell Sciences, School of Advanced Technologies in Medicine, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Samad Muhammadnejad - Cancer Biology Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Introduction High prevalence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and typically poor prognosis of this disease lead to late-stage diagnosis when potentially curative therapies are least effective; therefore, development of an effective and systematic treatment is an urgent requirement. Objectives In this study, several current treatments of HCC patients and their advantages or disadvantages were summarized. Moreover, various recent preclinical and clinical studies about the performances of two efficient agents, sorafenib or natural killer (NK) cells , against HCC cells were investigated. In addition, the focus of this review is on the correlation between sorafenib and NK cells and their effects on the performance of each other for better suppression of hepatocellular carcinoma. Results The majority of studies have shown that NK cells and sorafenib could enhance each other s performances and compensated the deficiency of one another in the advanced stages of HCC. However, some studies have reported that sorafenib reduced the number of NK cells and inhibited their proliferation as well as reactivity against HCC cells. This paradoxical effect of this tyrosine kinase inhibitor drug is for its dose and time depending manner. ConclusionFinally, it was concluded that interaction between sorafenib and NK cells is dose and time-dependent, therefore, a careful dose and time optimizing is necessary for the development of a combinational immune-cell therapy. In addition, immunotherapeutic approaches activating NK cells along with sorafenib treatment might improve the outcome of applied treatment for HCC patients.

Natural killer cells, Sorafenib, Hepatocellular carcinoma