Visualizing the trend statistics of all the genes in Figure 2B, we discovered that the genes with top increasing trends are CXCL11, MMP1, CXCL10 and CXCL9, while the genes with the top decreasing trends are MSMB, LTF, SCGB1A1 and GSTA2. Notably, CXCL10, a chemokine responsible for chemoattraction, has been demonstrated in an independent large-scale study as a significant prognostic biomarker of distant metastasis in locoregional advanced NPC patients (Tang et al., 2018). This evidence concerns the gene GSTA2 and nasopharyngeal carcinoma.