COL1A1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: Having established an association between COL1A1 expression profile and patients’ survival, to gain some mechanistic insight, we sought to determine the level of COL1A1 functional activity in the context of HCC progression by probing four GEO datasets, namely the GSE14323 (Mas), GSE3500 (Chen), GSE14520 (Roessler) and GSE6764 (Wurmbach) Liver HCC datasets, as well as immunohistochemistry.