Cohort-1 hepatic tissues were obtained from the Liver Cancer Institute (LCI) with informed consent from patients who underwent radical resection between 2002 and 2003 at the Liver Cancer Institute and Zhongshan Hospital (Fudan University, Shanghai, China). The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of the participating institutes. A total of 247 HCC patients were recruited. Cases were mainly from patients with a history of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection or HBV-related liver cirrhosis; all were diagnosed with HCC by two independent pathologists, with detailed information on clinical presentation and pathological characteristics. For 242 patients, disease-free survival and overall survival as well as the cause of death were available.
The gene expression data of cohort-2 has been published earlier (20 (link), 21 (link)). Briefly, gene expression profiling of cohort-2 was performed by the Laboratory of Experimental Carcinogenesis (LEC) and analyzed using NCI’s Human Array-Ready Oligo Set microarray platform (GPL1528). The microarray data is publicly available at the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo) with accession numbers GSE1898 and GSE4024.