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 Selleckchem SN-38 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 Selleck Akt 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 www.selleckchem.com/products/gw2580.html 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), Miconazole 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 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].