HGF and cervical squamous intraepithelial neoplasia: Nevertheless, in spite of absence of statistically significant differences between pre-invasive CIN and early invasive CR, some of these genes demonstrated coordinated changes in their mRNA expression as revealed by correlation analysis: specifically, VEGFC/VEGFR3 and HGF/MET pathway members exhibited moderate to strong correlation (p < 0.01, Figure 10), suggesting that these genes may cooperatively contribute to the initial stage of invasive cervical cancer progression and that there were some unaccounted factors underlying variation in their expression in CIN/CR.