ETV4 is also significantly related to growth at the advanced stage, lymph node metastasis, and the poor prognosis of NSCLCs, with a direct regulatory effect on matrix metalloproteinase 1 (MMP1), which is a common overregulated gene (Supplementary Table 1) related to cell proliferation and migration, and its co-overexpression is associated with a poor prognosis in human NSCLCs, suggesting that it could be a useful biomarker of tumor progression and worse outcomes in NSCLCs (Wang et al., 2020). Here, MMP1 is linked to metastatic malignant neoplasm in the lymph nodes.