Surprisingly, the expression of MAP2K3 was strikingly suppressed in all malignant tumor cells from the fourteen examined archival HCC samples, relative to the adjacent non-tumor tissues, which was supported by a semi-quantitative analysis using an index of the integrated absorbance (IA) for the IHC staining (Figure 1E, Table 1). Here, MAP2K3 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.