STAT3 and hepatocellular carcinoma: To further investigate which cell types, in addition to tumor cells, were responsible for pSTAT3 activation and the STAT3 signaling and whether this signaling pathway was correlated with the prognosis of HCC patients, we initially used immunohistochemistry to analyze pSTAT3 expression in HCC tissues and its association with patient's clinicopathological parameters (Table 2).