Xie et al. (2010) found that overexpression of c-Met induces cell invasion. Other studies have also reported that peritumoral stromal neutrophils and mesenchymal cells secrete high levels of HGF, which drove high rates of proliferation, invasion and metastasis in HCC by promoting the EMT (Ding et al., 2010; He et al., 2016). Moreover, phenotypic analysis validated that mixed-lineage leukemia (MLL), an epigenetic regulator, interacts with HGF/c-Met signaling to induce invasion and metastatic growth of HCC cell lines (Marquardt and Thorgeirsson, 2013; Takeda et al., 2013). Here, HGF is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.