MTA1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: To demonstrate the value of animal models in the study of HBV-HCC, we used MTA1 as an example to illustrate how we translated the findings from the woodchuck HCC model into human clinical research and demonstrated the potential clinical application of MTA1 and its major splice variant, MTA1dE4, in predicting early recurrence of HBV-HCC [32,33].