Liver Transplantation for Colorectal Cancer Liver Metastases

In the past, liver transplantation has been excluded as a therapeutic option for colorectal liver metastases in view of the disappointing survival obtained. At that time, liver transplantation represented a promising procedure in constant evolution, in a context of organ shortage, requiring an accurate selection of the patients to achieve good outcomes among different indications. Owing to the progresses observed in several fields of transplantation and oncology over the last decades and the encouraging results of a recent Norwegian trial, the role of liver transplantation for definitively unresectable colorectal liver metastases has been recently reconsidered. Actually, the high risk of early recurrence observed in the Norwegian series represents a major limitation of the procedure. A refinement of the selection criteria combined with the combination of liver transplantation with modern perioperative chemotherapy may represent the best way to define the actual role of liver transplantation in the management of metastatic colorectal cancer.