Ma et al. (2009) revealed that TIMP4 were differentially expressed and could distinguish cancerous and non-cancerous samples. GRB14 (Morzyglod et al., 2017), HOXB9 (Sun et al., 2017), and CELSR3 (Karpathakis et al., 2016), have been proven to be associated with proliferation and prognosis in multiple cancers, including HNSCC. Here, HOXB9 is linked to head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.