What really accelerated our HCV genomics program was being awarded a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) P30 Center to do translational and clinically relevant genomics studies (http://nida.viromics.washington.edu/). Maria Smith headed many of our early studies, the first of which looked for novel tumor markers in surgical liver samples from patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) [10] . This study, which by now used microarrays containing over 13,000 human cDNAs, revealed a set of 50 potential HCC marker genes that were upregulated in the majority of the tumors analyzed. This HCC marker set contained several cancer-related genes as well as a set of genes encoding secreted or plasma proteins that may provide potential serological markers for HCC.