Consistently, these genes have been found to be significantly associated with prognosis in several human cancers, including gastric, breast and colon cancer.42–44 In addition, HOXB9 has been identified as a putative oncogene promoting cell proliferation, migration, metastasis and cancer stem cell self-renewal.42,45 The optimal cutoff value for this score was 0.953 derived from the ROC curve using TCGA–HNSCC dataset (Supplementary Fig. 11A). The gene discussed is HOXB9; the disease is colonic neoplasm.