Liver transplantation is the preferred treatment for cirrhosis, end-stage liver failure, and hepatocellular carcinoma, and is also the only effective curative method. Liver ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) is one of the main adverse reactions of liver transplantation. During the operation, ischemia mediates the occurrence of liver IRI, promoting the cascade activation of reactive oxygen species and pro-inflammatory signals in Kupffer cells. With continued hepatocellular death during ischemia, damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) accumulate and are released into systemic circulation, triggering a cytokine and chemokine storm, resulting in poor prognosis, postoperative liver failure, systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS). In liver transplantation-related IRI, PANoptosis—including apoptosis, pyroptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, and autophagy—participates in the process, but a comprehensive review is lacking. This article systematically elaborates on the roles of different types of cell death in liver IRI and the crosstalk among these pathways. It also discusses the protective effects of inhibiting different forms of cell death, aiming to provide direction for future basic research and offer new ideas and strategies for the clinical treatment of liver IRI.

Liver transplantation is the preferred treatment for cirrhosis, end-stage liver failure, and hepatocellular carcinoma, and is also the only effective curative method. Liver ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) is one of the main adverse reactions of liver transplantation. During the operation, ischemia mediates the occurrence of liver IRI, promoting the cascade activation of reactive oxygen species and pro-inflammatory signals in Kupffer cells. With continued hepatocellular death during ischemia, damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) accumulate and are released into systemic circulation, triggering a cytokine and chemokine storm, resulting in poor prognosis, postoperative liver failure, systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS), and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS). In liver transplantation-related IRI, PANoptosis—including apoptosis, pyroptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, and autophagy—participates in the process, but a comprehensive review is lacking. This article systematically elaborates on the roles of different types of cell death in liver IRI and the crosstalk among these pathways. It also discusses the protective effects of inhibiting different forms of cell death, aiming to provide direction for future basic research and offer new ideas and strategies for the clinical treatment of liver IRI.

Cholangiocarcinoma is a malignant tumor originating from the bile duct epithelium, with the increasing incidence year by year. Its early symptoms are atypical and the diagnosis rate is low. Most of the patients are already in advanced stage when they are diagnosed, losing the best surgery period. Currently, the conservative treatments for unresectable extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma include stent placement, radiofrequency ablation, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, targeted and immunotherapy and other systemic treatments. But due to the high malignancy of biliary tract tumors, the tendency to develop drug resistance and the limited population benefited from the emerging treatment modalities, we urgently need to explore new treatment strategies to break this bottleneck. As a new treatment for cholangiocarcinoma, photodynamic therapy has attracted much attention for its clinical application and therapeutic effects. In this paper, we summarize the principles of photodynamic therapy, the combination of photodynamic and other therapeutic modalities, especially the combination of photodynamic with emerging immune and targeted therapies, and describe the current hotspot directions of photodynamic therapy research at home and abroad to provide reference for clinical treatment and research.