HMBS and hepatocellular carcinoma: Of these genes, previous studies, including those that used liver tissue as source material, have reported that STAT3, ADAM17, TGFB1, HMBS, E2F, and TP53 play significant roles in the hepatic fibrosis signaling pathway, and associated progression to hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is commonly differentially expressed [28,29,30,31,32,33].