The ITA.LI.CA Consortium: How multicentre collaboration helped shape the management of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma on the basis of real-world evidence

The growing diffusion of digitalisation and informatics has promoted the creation and analysis of large databases able to provide solid information. Analyses of “big data” generated by real-world practice are particularly useful for knowing incidence and mortality, disparities, temporal trends of diseases, identifying risk factors, predicting future scenarios, obtaining inputs for cost-effectiveness and treatment benefit modelling, designing new studies, and monitoring rare diseases. Although randomised controlled trials (RCTs) represent the gold-standard for generating evidence about new diagnostic, preventive or therapeutic procedures, their results should be integrated with real-world data to personalise patient management. Indeed, a substantial proportion of patients observed in field-practice have characteristics that prevent the access to RCTs or, when included, form sub-groups too small to provide robust post-hoc analyses. Furthermore, as RCTs are resource-consuming and designed to maximize the probability of success, they are generally performed in expert centres of high-income areas, excluding economically-deprived regions which could complementarily contribute to the medical progress as huge sources of real-world data. These considerations fuelled the creation in 1998 of the Italian Liver Cancer (ITA.LI.CA) consortium, with the aim to merge data of patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) managed in several centres. This cooperation permitted to analyse a multicentre, large cohort of HCC patients. Since then, the ITA.LI.CA group has progressively expanded to currently include 24 centres, and its database counts more than 9,000 patients. This article describes the history of the ITA.LI.CA consortium and presents its scientific production whose results greatly contributed to the incessant improvement of HCC management.