The prevalence and increased malignancy of Keratin 19 positive hepatocellular tumors in the dog and cat

Abstract

Hepatocellular carcinoma is a malignant tumor of the liver. It is known that a proportion of the hepatocellular carcinomas show positivity for K19. In several studies across multiple species these K19 positive tumors showed a more malignant nature compared to K19 negative tumors. During this study we used 96 dog liver samples and 20 cat liver samples to examine the prevalence of K19 positivity in hepatocellular tumors and determined the malignancy of K19 positive tumors in the dog and the cat.