We also verified that the gene expression differences were due to emphysema and not cancer since control patients had cancer while emphysema patients had cancer or lung volume reduction (LVRS), to that end we segregated the emphysema patients in cancer (n = 5) and no cancer (n = 4) and checked their gene expression level of Casp8 by qRT-PCR to asses that there was not significant differences in the cell survival among those two subset based on the co-founding disease (p = 1, Fig. 1B). The gene discussed is CASP8; the disease is pulmonary emphysema.