Overexpression of BTG1 inhibited the proliferation, migration and invasion of hepatocytes, thyroid, nasopharynx, esophagus, breast and non-small cell lung cancer cells and induced apoptosis and cell cycle arrest by downregulating the expression of Cyclin D1, Bcl-2 and MMP-9 (Sun et al., 2014a; Sun et al., 2014b; Sun et al., 2014c; Sun et al., 2014d; Lu et al., 2014; Sheng et al., 2014). Here, MMP9 is linked to non-small cell lung carcinoma.