Gastric cancer is a multifactorial disease and can be caused by environmental and molecular factors. It shows high incidence and mortality rates, due to late-stage diagnosis, which leads to poor prognosis. Therefore, there is an urgent need in identifying new gastric cancer specific biomarkers to diagnose the disease in early stage. The transcription factors CDX2 and HNF4α form a transcription complex which regulates intestinal development and differentiation and are not expressed in the normal

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... stomach. However, they are ectopically expressed in gastric intestinal metaplasia, which is a pre-cancerous stage of gastric cancer. Despite the fact that CDX2 and HNF4α are very useful diagnostic biomarkers in gastric cancer, they are "undruggable", because they are normally expressed in other tissues and their therapeutic targeting could cause some serious side effects. Consequently, the targets of transcription factors CDX2 and HNF4α could serve as possible therapeutic targets in gastric cancer. Nowadays, there is a big interest in long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), due to their tissue-specific and cancer-specific expression.