One of the key genes in the ECM-receptor interaction pathway is collagen, which has been previously described as a key protein for cancer cell survival mediated by TEM8 in tumor-associated stroma (Hsu et al., 2022) and TEM8 association with the PI3K-Akt signaling pathway in glioblastoma (Kundu et al., 2024) and gastric cancer (Cai et al., 2020). Here, AKT1 is linked to gastric cancer.