We also collected a relatively large sample cohort of HCC patients with or without BDTT in comparison with a previous study32, and used them to perform an IHC analysis of BMI1 expression, indicating that the patients with BDTT associated strongly with worse overall survival (Fig. 1d), while the patients with BDTT and high BMI1 expression correlated with low percentage of overall survival (Fig. 1e). This evidence concerns the gene BMI1 and hepatocellular carcinoma.