VEGFC and cancer: In gastric cancer, we found CTHRC1 was highly co-expressed with many factors, such as ACVRL1, ANGPTL3, ANGPTL4, NOTCH4, VEGFB, VEGFC etc., which have been proved to play an important role in angiogenesis in various cancer (Siamakpour-Reihani et al., 2015; Zheng et al., 2021).