Survivin, Bax, Bcl-2 and caspase3/9 are apoptosis-related genes associated with esophageal cancer (Pan et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2018), and MMP2/9, VEGF and EMT processes are involved in the metastasis of esophageal cancer (Li et al., 2019; Forghanifard et al., 2020; Ren et al., 2020; Tian et al., 2020). The gene discussed is MMP2; the disease is esophageal cancer.