To investigate the potential biological function of SPAG5 in HCC development, we stably transfected a SPAG5-specific short hairpin RNA (shSPAG5) into Huh7 and HCCLM3cells, and the western blot results showed that decreasing SPAG5 transcript levels significantly reduced SPAG5 protein expression in Huh7 and HCCLM3 cells (Fig. 3a-b). The gene discussed is SPAG5; the disease is hepatocellular carcinoma.