Aberrant expression of MMP12 was reported in several types of cancers, including hepatocellular carcinoma (He et al., 2018), lung cancer (Roman, 2017), colon cancer (Klupp et al., 2016) and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (Chung et al., 2014). The gene discussed is MMP12; the disease is malignant colon neoplasm.