The results showed that knockdown of KIT expression, or both KIT and ZSWIM4 expression inhibit cell proliferation to a similar level (supplementary Fig. 1A), and knockdown of ZSWIM4 expression didn’t show any additional effect, probably due to the fact that KIT is dominant in GISTs, and which is supported by that almost all GIST cells are killed by imatinib at high concentration (data not shown). The gene discussed is ZSWIM4; the disease is gastrointestinal stromal tumor.