There have been reports linking other extracellular proteases, such as MMP-9 (Mon et al, 2006a), MMP-1 (Zeng et al, 2006) and uPA (Mitra et al, 2006) with FAK signalling in other tumour cell types, but until now MMP-2 has not been reported to be involved. Here, MMP9 is linked to neoplasm.