VIRMA and hepatocellular carcinoma: Afterwards, the correlations between KIAA1429 expression and clinical characteristics were analyzed in 70 HCC tissues, revealing that high expression of KIAA1429 was significantly associated with tumor size (P = 0.0303), serum AFP (P = 0.0157), microvascular invasion (P = 0.0168), TNM stage (P = 0.0220) and BCLC stage (P = 0.0051) (Additional file 3: Table S1).