Urgent need for prognostic markers for hepatocellular carcinoma in the light of genomic instability and non-coding RNA signatures

In this editorial,we comment on an original article by Duan et al.Despite ad-vancements in the diagnosis and treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC),the identification of suitable prognostic factors remains challenging.In their paper,Duan et al identified long non-coding RNAs(LncRNAs)to quantify ge-nomic instability(GI)by combining LncRNA expression and somatic mutation profiles.They confirmed that the GI-derived LncRNA signature(GI-LncSig)could be an independent prognostic factor with the area under the curve of 0.773.Fur-thermore,the authors stated that GI-LncSig may have a better predictive perfor-mance than TP53 mutation status alone.However,studies exploring genetic markers for predicting the prognosis of HCC are crucial for identifying thera-peutic targets and enhancing diagnostic and treatment strategies to mitigate the global burden of liver cancer.