PTCSC3 and gastric cancer: Notably, Zhang et al. found that low PTCSC3 expression levels could not only be used to distinguish early-stage GC patients from healthy individuals, and that patients with low plasma levels had a significantly worse outcome, but that PTCSC3 expression in GC patients increased post-treatment compared to pre-treatment levels, indicating that PTCSC3 has diagnostic and prognostic values in GC patients [23].