Growing pieces of evidence demonstrate the important implications of tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) in gastric carcinogenesis, which is an essential proinflammatory cytokine in the tumor microenvironment of GC and the main cytokine of cancer pain (Ishimoto et al., 2017; Baj et al., 2020; Zhuang et al., 2020). The gene discussed is TNF; the disease is gastric cancer.