HGF and neoplasm: Murine HGF binds to, but does not fully activate human Met [27]; to circumvent this obstacle to mimicking paracrine HGF driven tumor growth in humans, we used SCID mice that are genetically engineered to express only human HGF (hHGF; hHGFki/ki,SCID/SCID, also known as Hgftm1.1 (HGF)Aveo).