HAMP and hepatocellular carcinoma: Also, human HCC tissues have shown lower hepcidin expression than adjacent non-cancerous liver tissue or normal liver tissues [6, 16–20], animal models of HCC have shown low hepcidin expression [7, 21], and HCC cells lines have shown lower hepcidin expression compared with primary human hepatocytes [6] and human liver samples [22] (Table 1).