DDX17 and hepatocellular carcinoma: In order to validate that correlation between DDX17 expression and HCC progression, IHC was performed to evaluate the DDX17 protein expression in 105 human HCC specimens and substantially overexpressed DDX17 protein was found in HCC specimens compared to adjacent normal tissue (Table 1, p < 0.001) and results also showed that the expression of DDX17 was increased significantly as HCC progressed to more advanced stage (Fig. 2a, b).