The most studied ncRNAs in HNSC include ANRIL, HOTAIR, SOX2OT, NEAT-1, MALAT-1 and UCA-1 associated with nasopharyngeal, pharyngeal, laryngeal, esophageal, oral or tongue squamous cell carcinomas or metastatic tumours.22,46–48 We were not able to detect expressions of HOTAIR, SOX2OT and MEG-3. Previous reports on these three genes were produced using low throughput PCR-based methods involving cDNA amplification and it is possible that the expression of these transcripts is too low to be detected in the TCGA NGS data. Here, SOX2-OT is linked to tongue squamous cell carcinoma.