NKX6-3 and gastric cancer: To confirm our results, we recapitulated NKX6.3 gene expression levels in a large cohort of gastric cancer patients (NCBI GEO database, accession numbers GSE27342) and found that NKX6.3 expression was also markedly decreased in sporadic gastric cancers with TNM stage II, III, and IV (Fig. 1d).