Therefore, it is unlikely that the tumour suppressor effects of miR‐9 in HNSCC are through E‐cadherin but potentially through another of its oncogenic targets such as CXCR4 expression (Fenger et al., 2014; Hildebrandt et al., 2010; Lu et al., 2012, 2014a,b; Sun et al., 2013; Yu et al., 2014). Here, CXCR4 is linked to head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.