Interestingly, in the study performed by Takeuchi et al, the investigators examined 36 tumours and observed that the mRNA copy numbers of B2M in T3/T4 cases (mean 1.78 × 105 copies) had a tendency to be lower than that in T1/T2 cases (mean 4.44 × 105 copies; P=0.16), but were not highly correlated with another reference gene. The gene discussed is B2M; the disease is neoplasm.