TNF and neoplasm: Hyper NF-κB activity in VS potentiated hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) to c-Met autocrine feed-forward loop to promote tumor cell proliferation (108), and increased the expression of factors that reported to be increased in VS or correlated with the prognosis or absolute tumor growth rate of VS, such as matrix metalloproteinase 2 (MMP-2), MMP-9 (40), MMP-14 (41), COX-2 (110), interleukin-1 (IL-1), IL-6, TNF-α (64) and signal transducers and activators of transcription 1 (STAT1) (111).