IL6ST and hepatocellular carcinoma: The literature on the IL-6 functions on cancers reports that IL-6 binds to its receptor (IL-6R) and forms a complex with glycoprotein 130 (IL-6Rβ) to activate the downstream protein kinases, and subsequently activates STAT1, 3, and 5 (Heinrich et al., 2003; Babon et al., 2014; Jones and Jenkins, 2018) contributing to promotion of malignancy in colon cancer and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) (Ahmad et al., 2017; Sun et al., 2018).