SMO and skin basal cell carcinoma: Starting from our evidence correlating Hh pathway effectors (i.e., GLI1 and GLI2) with CC patients survival, we first treated CC cell lines with a pharmacological SMO inhibitor, GDC-0449, a small molecule already approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of advanced basal cell carcinoma (BCC) (Dijkgraaf et al., 2011; Takebe et al., 2015).