Given that the data from Fig. 1 and Supplementary Table 1 demonstrated that PDK4 is significantly downregulated in HCC tissue specimens, we suspected that loss of PDK4 expression might be closely associated with HCC progression, which prompted us to perform loss-of-function experiments to further explore the effects of loss of PDK4 function on HCC cell growth by CCK-8 assay and colony formation assay. Here, PDK4 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.