KDR and cancer: A high level of VEGF in the plasma is a poor prognostic feature in several cancer types, and the blockade of the VEGF–VEGFR signalling pathway has demonstrated the significant improvement of clinical outcomes in some cancers [15] besides HCC [8,9,10], including renal cell carcinoma (RCC) [16,17,18] and colorectal cancer (CRC) [19,20].