Recently, many studies have shown that apatinib, which is a newly developed inhibitor of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 (VEGFR-2) (Ding et al., 2013), exhibits encouraging antitumor activities and tolerable toxicities when used to treat advanced HCC (Wang and Tang, 2018; Xue et al., 2018; Yang and Qin, 2018). Here, KDR is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.