Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) has been reported to be associated with tumour susceptibility (Lee et al, 1996b), lymph node metastasis (Ogoshi et al, 1996), induction of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (Nabeta et al, 2000) and HER-2/neu overexpression (Kono et al, 2002) in patients with gastric adenocarcinoma. The gene discussed is ERBB2; the disease is neoplasm.