Dr. Richard A. Van Etten — director of the NCI-designated Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UC Irvine — breaks down the late-breaking ENCORE performance data for HelioLiver, presented at AASLD’s The Liver Meeting.
At AASLD’s The Liver Meeting, Dr. Richard A. Van Etten of UC Irvine’s Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center walks through late-breaking results from the ENCORE study — a validation of HelioLiver, the multi-analyte blood test built to catch liver cancer earlier.
What the ENCORE data showed
In the study, HelioLiver identified hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) with a sensitivity of 76% for early-stage disease and 85% across all stages, at 91% specificity. That performance outpaced both alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) alone and the GALAD model — two of the tools most commonly used in liver cancer surveillance today.
ENCORE was a blinded, multicenter validation study drawing on blood samples from 303 people: 122 with confirmed HCC, 125 with benign liver disease, and 56 with other cancers. Testing the assay against that mix — rather than healthy volunteers alone — matters, because a real-world surveillance test has to tell cancer apart from the chronic and benign liver conditions that so often surround it.
Why it matters
HelioLiver reads two kinds of signal from a single blood draw — cell-free DNA (cfDNA) methylation patterns and protein tumor markers — to indicate whether HCC may be present. Because liver cancer offers far more curative treatment options when it’s found early, a sensitive and convenient blood test could help more high-risk patients keep up with surveillance, and make that surveillance easier and more cost-effective than imaging-based approaches alone.
The results were shared in a poster titled “A Multi-Analyte Blood Test for Accurate and Early Detection of Hepatocellular Carcinoma,” part of the data Helio Genomics and its commercial partner, Fulgent Genetics, announced at the meeting. HelioLiver’s performance continues to be evaluated in Helio’s pivotal prospective trial, CLiMB (NCT03694600).
Interview link: Watch the interview on OncologyTube →