Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common cancer that has a high mortality rate, largely because of metastasis. Early in metastasis, HCC cells detach from the main tumor, possibly because their neighboring cells “evict” them in a process called extrusion. However, it’s unclear whether suppression of a protein called BVES might contribute to metastatic extrusion in HCC. To find out, researchers recently examined HCC cell extrusion in cultured cells, human tissues, and a mouse model. They found that BVES expression was downregulated in HCC in general and that it was lower in extruded HCC (Huh7) cells than in non-extruded HCC cells. Further experiments suggested that BVES normally regulates the proteins ZO-1 and GEFT to reduce the activity of the molecule RhoA, which is involved in the physical “squeezing” of extrusion. Therefore, the suppression of BVES in HCC allows this squeezing to take place. Although the potential contributions of other mechanisms need to be investigated, these findings reveal that BVES downregulation facilitates HCC metastasis and provide insights that may aid in the development of new therapies.