HPSE and neoplasm: Huang et al. (2012)demonstrated that allele loss and reduced HPSE expression areclosely correlated with tumor progression and poor prognosis in HCC patients.HPSE is a tumor suppressor gene based on the fact that tumorsuppressor genes usually cause loss of heterozygosity (LOH) in carcinogenesis (Huang et al., 2012). The roleof HPSE in HCC is currently controversial. In this study, weselected six haplotype-tagging SNPs (htSNPs) distributed throughout the entire geneand investigated whether polymorphisms in HPSE were associated withthe risk of HCC in a Chinese population.