These results demonstrated that TAOK3 could be viewed as an oncogene and prognostic biomarker in ESCC, similar to other cancers.[16, 34, 35] The correlation analysis showed the expression level of protein IRGM was positively correlated with protein TAOK3, which indicated that the expression of IRGM was regulated by TAOK3 in ESCC tissues. Here, TAOK3 is linked to cancer.