Several studies reported the potential use of activated caspase-3 as a biomarker to predict tumor responses to treatments11, in association with other prognostic variables (e.g., vascular invasion, lymph node metastasis, advanced clinical stage, and size of tumor)4, suggesting that cleaved caspase-3 could be used as a potential factor to predict tumor progression and poor prognosis in several cancer types10. The gene discussed is CASP3; the disease is neoplasm.