NUAK1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: we performed correlation analyses on the expression profile of NUAK1 mRNA and the abundance of CD8+T cells in 370 HCC samples based on The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, and the results demonstrated that the expression level of NUAK1 mRNA was inversely correlated with the abundance of CD8+T cells in HCC samples (Fig. 1C).