MALL and cancer: Furthermore, when we tried to analyze the function of the common upregulated genes, i.e., HOXC6, SGK1, S100A4, MALL, CEACAM6, SLCO4A1-AS1, C11orf86, ENSG00000268621, and ENSG00000129270, at least 5 of them, i.e., SGK1, S100A4, MALL, CEACAM6 and SLCO4A1-AS1, have been reported to be implicated in the malignant phenotype of various cancers, while the remaining genes have not been well studied (Egeland et al., 2017; Liang et al., 2017; Rizeq, Zakaria & Ouhtit, 2018; Yu et al., 2018).