In HCC, Pan et al. find the mRNA and protein levels of CHI3L1 in HCC tissues were up-regulated compared with those in adjacent peritumoral tissues and further increased in metastatic tumor (P < 0.05) in 19 pairs of HCC specimens, and they further show that HCC patients with positive CHI3L1 expression have worse overall survival and disease-free survival compared with those with negative CHI3L1 expression (P < 0.001, respectively) by Kaplan-Meier survival analysis. The gene discussed is CHI3L1; the disease is hepatocellular carcinoma.