Zhang et al. (2019) found that SOCS5 could promote metastasis of hepatocellular carcinoma via the activation of the PI3K/Akt/mTOR pathway. SOCS7 may suppress the development of prostate cancer via the activation of the JAK/STAT pathway (Ge et al., 2012). As important negative regulators of the JAK/STAT signaling pathway, there is evidence to suggest that SOCS family genes could potentially act as critical roles in the development of several human diseases, including several types of cancers (Quentmeier et al., 2008; Ge et al., 2012; Gao et al., 2013a; Li et al., 2019; Ren et al., 2019). This evidence concerns the gene SOAT1 and hepatocellular carcinoma.