CXCR4 and hepatocellular carcinoma: CXCR4 is selectively expressed on a fraction of tumor endothelial cells in HCC tissues, and high levels of CXCR4 tend to develop a sinusoidal vasculature in tumors, which can be used as a novel vascular marker for vessel sprouting in HCC tissues (Meng et al., 2017; Xu et al., 2017).