In summary, the present research elucidated a HOXC-AS1-MYC feed-forward loop in exacerbating tumor growth and metastasis in GC (Fig. 8), which offers the first evidence for HOXC-AS1 as a tumorigenic lncRNA in cancer and could also highlight HOXC-AS1 as a promising target for GC treatment. Here, MYC is linked to gastric cancer.