Written informed consent was obtained from all clinical patients involved in this study. We excluded patients with acute infection from this study. Table 1 Peritumoral α-SMA expression according to characteristics of 224 hepatitis B virus related HCC patients Characteristics

Low expression (n = 44) (cell numbers ≤ 72) High expression (n = 180) (cell numbers > 72) p Gender Male 40 152 0.342 Female 4 28 Age(years) ≤51 24 94 0.867 >51 20 86 ALT(U/L) ≤75 35 162 0.700 >75 9 18 selleck chemicals AFP(ng/ml) ≤20 18 68 0.731 >20 26 112 Cirrhosis Yes 37 155 0.810 No 7 25 Vascular invasion Yes 8 46 0.446 No 36 134 Encapsulation Yes 24 96 1.000 No 20 84 Number Single 37 155 0.810 Multiple 7 25 Size ≤5 38 122 0.015 >5 6 58 Differentiation I-II 41 128 0.002 III-IV 3 52 TNM Protein Tyrosine Kinase inhibitor stage I 37 121 0.028   II-III 7 59   α-SMA: α-smooth muscle actin; AFP: alpha fetoprotein; ALT, alanine

aminotransferase; TNM, tumor-node-metastasis. Tissue microarray design and immunohistochemistry A tissue microarray (TMA) was constructed and immunohistochemistry was carried out as described previously [15, 22]. Under low-power magnification (100X), positive staining cells were screened and photographs of four representative fields were captured under high-power magnification (400X) in Leica DMLA light microscope (Leica Microsystems, Wetzlar, Germany). The positive cell density of each core was counted by two independent investigators blind to clinical outcome and knowledge of the clinicopathologic data. Data were expressed as mean value (±SE) of the triplicate cores taken from each patient. Primary antibodies were mouse anti-human monoclonal antibodies combined with α-SMA (1:100; DAKO), glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP 1:100; Cell signaling), desmin (1:50; DAKO), vinculin (1:200; Upstate, Millipore) and vimentin (1:100; Sigma-Aldrich), P-type ATPase respectively. Collection of tumor conditioned medium (TCM) and generation

of tumor-induced activated HSCs in vitro As described previously [15], tumor conditioned medium (TCM) was collected from HCC cell lines MHCC97L, HCCLM3 and HCCLM6, respectively. Briefly, 5 × 106 tumor cells were seeded into this website 100-mm dishes containing 10 mL of DMEM with 10% fetal bovine serum for 24 hours and thereafter washed twice with serum-free DMEM, and then cultured in serum-free DMEM. After another 24 hours, the supernatant was centrifuged, filtered and stored at −20°C until use. HSC cell line LX-2 was cultured in T25 flasks (0.6×106) with 5 ml TCM supplemented with 5% FBS for 24 hours. Flow cytometric analysis According to previous report [18, 23], four identified phenotypes of activated HSCs including GFAP, fibronectin, CD56 and IL-17R (antibody from ebioscinece, Santa Cruze and R&D Systems, respectively) were used for flow cytometric analysis. Nonspecific IgG of the corresponding class was used as the negative control. Isolation and culture of cells HSCs/myofibroblasts were isolated as our described previously [15].