Additionally, to investigate the clinical relevance of the target gene expression in gastric cancer, we examined their expression levels at different stages of TCGA gastric cancer samples and observed significantly higher expression of SERPINE1, COL5A2, SEMA3C and LOXL2 in more aggressive stages (Fig. 3e and Supplementary Fig. 12c). This evidence concerns the gene COL5A2 and gastric cancer.