HGF and hepatocellular carcinoma: In addition, Xiong et al. and Lau et al. showed that the stemness of HCC cells was enhanced by IL-6 and HGF secreted by CAFs, possibly through the Notch and Erk signaling pathways, respectively [44, 45, 48], and Liu et al. determined that CAFs promote migration, invasion, and EMT in HCC cells in vitro and HCC cell metastasis in vivo through the CCL2/CCL5-Hh and CCL7/CXCL16-TGF-β pathways [47].