STC2 and metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes: STC2 (stanniocalcin 2), whose expression in ESCA was higher than that in corresponding normal tissues, was significantly associated with lymph node metastasis, lymphatic invasion and distant metastasis (Kita et al., 2011; Kashyap et al., 2012), and has been reported as a prognostic glycolysis-related gene in HNSCC (Ferreira do Carmo et al., 2020; Liu and Yin, 2020).