TAOK1 and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease: NAFLD has recently emerged as the leading cause of HCC, which is one of the most harmful malignant tumors.3 By analysis of the microarray GEO data sets of the 2 large cohorts of HCC subjects (n=91 for GSE102079 and n=214 for GSE14520), we found that TAOK1 gene expression was significantly higher in HCC tumors than in adjacent nontumor liver tissue (p<0.0001).