SPRY4 and cancer: Moreover, ectopic expression of SPRY4-IT1 led to the significant inhibited malignant phenotype of gastric cancer cells both in vitro and vivo. However, SPRY4-IT1 has been found to be up-regulated in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma, breast cancer and bladder cancer, which suggests that SPRY4-IT1 has an tissue-specific expression pattern and may function as oncogene or tumor suppressor in different cancer [20, 27, 28].