Many studies showed that miR‐194 is downregulated and functions as a tumor suppressor by downregulating its target genes such as N‐cadherin (Meng et al., 2010), AKT2 (Zhao et al., 2014) and BMI1 (Dong et al., 2011) in a variety of cancers (Khella et al., 2013; Meng et al., 2010; Senanayake et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2015; Zhao et al., 2014; Zhu et al., 2016). Here, BMI1 is linked to cancer.