Particularly, recent studies have demonstrated that genes involved in our risk model, such as Smad ubiquitin regulatory factor 1 (SMURF1) and NIMA-related kinase 7 (NEK7), played the essential roles in promoting the progression of GC (Ji et al., 2018; Jiang et al., 2019; Li et al., 2021). Here, NEK7 is linked to gastric cancer.