Studies by Nishi et al. (2002) showed that Egr-1, a transcriptional regulator of ‘inducible’ genes associated with stress responses, was induced in response to hypoxia and that Egr-1 could alter the basal transcriptional activity of EGF-R in several somatic tissue cancer cell lines (U-2OS, Saos-1, KB and HeLa). The gene discussed is EGR1; the disease is cancer.