HGF and cancer: As a result, differentiated CAFs induce motility and migration in cancer cells via induction of EMT through secretion of a number of soluble factors which include TGF-β1 (Zhuang et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2017), IL-6 (Yeh et al., 2015; Goulet et al., 2019), and hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) (Wang et al., 2007; Grimm et al., 2015), and/or by direct chemokine attraction through CXCL1 (Shi et al., 2015) and CCL1 (Yeh et al., 2015).