NT5E and cancer: In digestive system cancers, recently, Lu et al. evaluated the clinical significance and prognostic value of CD73 in human gastric cancer (n = 68 patients): analysis of CD73 expression by immune histochemistry (IHC) revealed that overexpression of CD73 was positively correlated with differentiation of tumor, depth of invasion (P < 0.001), nodal status (P = 0.003), metastasis (P = 0.013), and the cancer stage (P < 0.001), and the overall survival rate was low in the patients with high expression of CD73 (P < 0.001) [19].