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Reptin and Pontin are related ATPases associated with stoichiometric amounts in several complexes involved in chromatin remodeling, transcriptional regulation, and telomerase activity. We found that Reptin was up-regulated in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and that down-regulation of Reptin led to growth arrest. We show here that Pontin messenger RNA (mRNA) is also up-regulated in human HCC 3.9-fold as compared to nontumor liver (P ‫؍‬ 0.0004). Pontin expression was a strong independent factor of poor prognosis in a multivariate analysis. H epatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the main type of primary liver cancer. It is the fifth most common cancer worldwide and bears a very poor prognosis, mainly because of the lack of efficient therapy. Looking for new targets, we performed a comparative proteomic analysis between HCC and peritumoral liver, which led to the discovery of many deregulated proteins, 1 including Reptin. Reptin overexpression was associ-

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