MSX2 and carcinoma: In addition, knockdown of MSX2 by small interfering RNA (siRNA) or small hairpin RNA (shRNA) inhibited the cell growth of gastric (Ohta et al., 2009) and ovarian (Zhai et al., 2011) carcinoma, indicating that the function of MSX2 is likely to be relevant to the regulation of the proliferation of epithelial cells as well as osteogenic cells.