In the past, numerous reports suggest that Gli1 is a biomarker of invasion, metastasis, or prognosis in various types of cancer, including lung squamous cell carcinoma, glioblastoma, breast cancer, colorectal cancer and pancreatic adenocarcinoma (Wang et al., 2016, 2017; Zhang et al., 2016; Kasiri et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2017). Here, GLI1 is linked to colorectal cancer.