OLFM4 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: To further validate the findings in our cohort, we analyzed the impacts of OLFM4 in other ESCC cohorts, such as the Li’s cohort25 and the Liu’s cohort26, and found that OLFM4 displayed positive association with DNA replication-related proteins at the protein level in these cohorts (Fig. 2d and Supplementary Fig. 3d).