A study assessing the impact of baseline nutritional status on treatment response and survival in nonmetastatic patients with a locally advanced esophageal cancer treated with definitive chemoradiotherapy (CRT) found that in multivariate analysis, serum albumin level >3.5 g/dL was the only independent predictive factor of complete response to CRT (P = 0.009). The gene discussed is ALB; the disease is esophageal cancer.