Recent studies have confirmed that HOTAIR expression is closely related to the invasion, migration and prognosis of malignant tumours.22–24 It is believed that HOTAIR elicits its effect by silencing the expression of target genes through epigenetic modification.9 In this study, we found that HOTAIR was highly expressed in PCa by analysing a large number of patient samples from TCGA dataset. This evidence concerns the gene HOTAIR and cancer.