Introduction: Although overall survival rates have been around 70% after five years, recurrence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has indices in literature ranging from 6 to 26%.

Objective: Evaluate hepatocellular carcinoma immunoexpression of immunohistochemical markers: HSP70, Glipican3, Glutamin synthetase, Beta-Catenin, CK7, Ck19, HepPar1 and PCNA, in patients undergoing liver transplantation for HCC, studying its association with tumor characteristics and prognosis of patients undergoing liver transplantation for HCC.

Methods: We studied 90 patients who underwent liver transplantation from 1996 to 2010. We evaluated factors related to the onset of neoplastic recurrence as size of the largest lesion, number of lesions, histological grade, presence of vascular invasion, AFP level. The correlation of expression of immunohistochemical markers studied was correlated with each of these variables.

Results: The presence of immunohistochemical markers glutamin synthetase showed a positive trend toward lower survival, and presence of HepPar1 negative correlated with the appearance of neoplastic recurrence. HSP70 positive patients had higher prevalence of histologic grade III. Patients with positive Glipican3 showed larger lesions and more patients had AFP greater than 200 ng / ml. PCNA positive patients had bigger lesions. HepPar1 negative patients had larger lesions and tended to have more nodules. Patients with positive Beta-Catenin showed larger nodules and more histologic grade III. Patients with positive CK19 showed a tendency to have larger nodules. The association between Beta-catenin and Glipican3 showed positive association with larger nodules.Conclusion: There was no statistical correlation of these markers and the specific disease survival except for the presence of glutamine synthetase which showed only a positive trend of association with survival. The immunoreactivity of these markers did not correlate with the time of appearance of a recurrent tumor, with the exception of the Hep-Par1, which, if negative, was correlated with higher frequency of occurrence of relapse. However, most of the markers studied showed correlation with at least one of the variables studied, confirming our hypothesis that these markers can indeed assist in assessing the prognosis of patients undergoing liver transplantation for HCC.

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