In addition to the requirement of functional apoptotic pathways such as CD95/Fas (Houghton et al, 1997), bax (Rampino et al, 1997) and p53 (Vogelstein et al, 2000) for drug sensitivity in colorectal tumour cells, this suggests that integrity of the TGFβ pathway may be an additional condition for efficiency of 5FU treatment. This evidence concerns the gene BAX and colorectal neoplasm.