Serum AFP is widely used in clinical practice for diagnosis, pretreatment prognosis, predicting survival after transarterial chemoembolisation and tumour response to therapy, as it is considered to continuously reflect HCC tumour activity and viable burden.24,26–33 Our analysis of subjects from the two Phase 3 REACH and REACH-2 trials demonstrated that baseline AFP is an important prognostic factor and a predictive biomarker for ramucirumab OS benefit, and confirms that AFP ≥ 400 ng/ml is an appropriate selection criterion for ramucirumab in patients with advanced previously treated HCC. The gene discussed is AFP; the disease is hepatocellular carcinoma.