SOX9 and hepatocellular carcinoma: Since Sox9 is the most frequently expressed stemness marker from our findings above, we proceeded to examine the immunohistochemical expression of Sox9 in a cohort of 6 multi-focal HCC cases, which were proven to be intra-hepatic metastasis as determined by DNA fingerprinting using loss of heterozygosity (LOH) assay, comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) [17].