Our previous studies revealed that tumour vascularity in NSCLCs is associated with intratumoral expression of VEGF-A (Masuya et al, 2001), interleukin-8 (Masuya et al, 2001), neural-cadherin (Nakashima et al, 2003), and that tumour vascularity is correlated with the survival rate of NSCLC patients (Nakashima et al, 2003). The gene discussed is CXCL8; the disease is non-small cell lung carcinoma.