Cabozantinib as a Second-Line Agent in Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma

The results of the phase III CELESTIAL trial of cabozantinib were presented by Prof. Ghassan Abou-Alfa at the ASCO Gastrointestinal Cancer Symposium held in San Francisco from January 18 to 20, 2018 [1]. Although most of the previous clinical trials of second-line agents, except regorafenib [2], failed [3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], the CELESTIAL trial yielded positive results in line with most expectations and produced a fourth molecular-targeted drug option for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Based on this trial, cabozantinib can be added as a second-line option to the first-line drugs sorafenib [9, 10] and lenvatinib [11] and the second-line drug regorafenib [2] (Table ​(Table11). Table 1 Phase III clinical trials of advanced stage HCC