HGF and hepatocellular carcinoma: Given the high sinusoidal expression of SCARF-1 in HCC tumour, we also investigated the effects of the tumourigenic growth factors, hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and found that they also increased the cellular expression of SCARF-1 in HSEC, as determined by cell-based ELISA (Supplementary Figure 4a), without increasing transcription (Supplementary Figure 4b).