SPTBN1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: In human HCC tissues, we also found that SOCS1 could be weakly stained in HCC with higher SPTBN1 expression and hardly detectable in HCC with lower SPTBN1 expression, which is consistent with the report that the incidence of SOCS1 aberrant methylation was 65% in human primary HCC tumor samples 51.