Surprisingly, however, shRNA knock down of both MCV T antigens in infected MCC cell lines did not affect AKT phosphorylation and the lack of correlation between MCV status and AKT phosphorylation in the tumor samples also suggests that the MCV viral T antigens do not contribute to AKT pathway activation in MCC cells, although the significance of the latter observation is impaired by the low number of MCV negative samples. The gene discussed is AKT1; the disease is Merkel cell skin cancer.