Lu et al. (2016a), Lu et al. (2016b) and Zhang et al. (2016) reported that lncRNA AFAP1-AS1 is upregulated in HCC tissues and promotes HCC cell proliferation and invasion and may serve as a therapeutic target. Many dysregulated lncRNAs, such as GAS5, PVT1, LINC01018, and CECR7, are differentially expressed in HCC tissues or serum and are involved in regulating disease progression (Abbastabar et al., 2018; Chang et al., 2016; Guo et al., 2018). Here, AFAP1 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.