Pu et al. (2018) show that the ratio of miR-144-3p/miR-21-5p investigated in EVs extracted from two groups of patients (HCC and chronic hepatitis B) was significantly higher than in EV-depleted serum. Furthermore, statistical analysis has indicated that the miR-144-3p/miR-21-5p ratio performs better than serum AFP for HCC diagnosis (area under the ROC curve 0.78) (Pu et al., 2018). This evidence concerns the gene AFP and chronic hepatitis B virus infection.