SOCS1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: As SOCS1 and SOCS3 are implicated in the regulation of HGF, EGF and IL-6 signaling that promote hepatocyte proliferation and HCC pathogenesis [17, 22, 26, 27], we first evaluated the relationship between the expression of SOCS1 and SOCS3 with the cell cycle regulation genes.