Among them, Mcl-1 and Bcl-2 exerted anti-apoptotic effects in HCC cells (Cucarull et al. 2020), c-Myc and VEGF showed strong pro-tumor growth effects(Zhang et al. 2020), and TIMP-1 was involved in the regulation of HCC metastasis (Wu et al. 2020). Here, MCL1 is linked to hepatocellular carcinoma.