RELA and hepatocellular carcinoma: We therefore next investigated if RelA T505A mice would exhibit earlier onset of tumorigenesis in the N-nitrosodiethylamine (DEN) model of hepatocellular carcinoma.25 DEN is a DNA alkylating agent and so we first investigated whether acute administration, which promotes hepatocyte death followed by compensatory proliferation, resulted in any observable differences between WT and RelA T505A mice.