CRYAB and hepatocellular carcinoma: CRYAB is a member of the small heat shock protein family (Zhang et al., 2019a; Zhang et al., 2019b; Zhang et al., 2019c), and many studies have confirmed that CRYAB plays an important role in a variety of tumours, such as OSCC (Annertz et al., 2014), colorectal cancer (Li et al., 2017), breast cancer (Kim et al., 2011), and hepatocellular carcinoma (Tang et al., 2009).