The results of this analysis show that most candidate genes are associated with 3 signaling pathways, the NF-κB (KEGG: hsa04064), PI3K-Akt (KEGG: hsa04151) and MAPK (KEGG: hsa04010) pathways, which all have a role in cancer, implying that our candidate gene selection method is relevant to identify protease and protease inhibitor genes that are crucial for GBM pathology. Here, AKT1 is linked to cancer.