HIC1 is continually silenced in human cancers, including breast cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, liver cancer, and lung cancer (Morton et al., 1996; Chen et al., 2005; Jin et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017), and this is assumed to be ascribed to promoter hypermethylation (Zhang et al., 2010). This evidence concerns the gene HIC1 and liver cancer.