Aberrant activation of the HGF/c-MET axis has been shown to play a critical role in the development and progression of various human cancers (Catenacci et al., 2017; Heo et al., 2017; Gayyed et al., 2015; Peltola et al., 2017) and is often associated with poor clinical outcome and drug resistance (Mahtouk et al., 2010; Guo et al., 2020). Here, HGF is linked to cancer.