In addition, HMGA2 was demonstrated to play a critical role in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in various cancers such as gastric cancer (Zha et al., 2013), hepatocellular carcinoma (Luo et al., 2013) and nasopharyngeal cancer (Xia et al., 2015a), thus inducing epithelial cancer invasion and metastasis. Here, HMGA2 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.