HGF and hepatocellular carcinoma: And in addition to boosting proliferation of hepatocytes (Nakamura, 1994), HGF strengthened proliferation as well as migration of different cell types, including endothelial (Morimoto et al., 1991) and mesothelial cells (Warn et al., 2001), but in multiple cancer cell lines, such as in hepatoma HepG2 cells, HGF exerted a potent antiproliferative effect, thus obviously displaying bidirectional impacts (Tajima et al., 1991).