Consistent with RNA-seq data, inflammatory cytokine genes (IL-6, TNF-α, IL-1β and IFN-γ), pro-inflammatory pathways (NF-κB (p65), JAK2/STAT3 and MAPK (ERK, JNK, P38), as well as ROS biosynthesis genes were positively co-enriched with NOD2 (Additional file 3: Fig. S4a, b) in GSEA analyses of the TCGA HCC dataset (n = 371) with the gene ontology (GO) and Hallmark gene sets. Here, STAT3 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.