PLK1 and hepatocellular carcinoma: While AURKA and its substrate, PLK1, inhibitors have been extensively investigated in preclinical models and early-phase clinical studies in other malignancies, accumulating evidence indicates that their application in hepatocellular carcinoma has so far remained largely limited to preclinical and early translational settings, rather than routine clinical integration [15,17,20,42,55,56,57].