In diffuse glioma and hepatocellular carcinoma, CD161 exerts carcinogenic effects by multiple cancer-related signaling pathways, including CD161-CLEC2D pathway, TCR signaling pathway and cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction (Author Anonymous, 2021; Mathewson et al., 2021; Sun et al., 2021). The gene discussed is CLEC2D; the disease is hepatocellular carcinoma.