STAT3 and hepatocellular carcinoma: Hu et al. indicated that IL-17 promotes the proliferation of liver cancer cells (HBV+) by activating the IL-6/STAT3 signaling pathway (Hu et al., 2017), and Tian et al. found that IL-17 expression and promoter methylation were closely related to the progression of chronic HBV infection, particularly in patients with HCC (Tian et al., 2019).