SMAD2 and hepatocellular carcinoma: Therefore, a recent study using such approach in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), showed that cell repopulation of cirrhotic scaffolds displayed a unique up-regulation of genes related to EMT and TGF-β signaling as well as high concentration of endogenous TGF-β1 in comparison to healthy scaffolds and TGF-β1-induced phosphorylation of canonical proteins Smad2/3 (Mazza et al., 2019).