Of those lncRNAs, the lncRNA whose expression was most upregulated in TGF-β1-treated cells was the lncRNA NKILA (Fig. 2b), whose expression was consistently found to be upregulated by more than 10-fold in both ESCC cell lines compared with the corresponding untreated cell lines (Fig. 2c). Here, NKILA is linked to esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.