CTCF and hepatocellular carcinoma: CTCF, MLLT1, and TGIF2 are transcriptional regulators that play crucial roles in the transcription of important proto-oncogenes such as FOXM1, MYC, HoxA gene family, and OCT4 in multiple cancer types including HCC, esophageal cancer, and lung adenocarcinoma (Zhang et al., 2017; Du et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2022).