HIC1 and breast cancer: 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).