The following findings clearly show that VEGF-C and VEGF-D are bona fide target genes for NCoR repression: i, breast cancer cells expressing higher NCoR mRNA levels express lower levels of the lymphangiogenic genes; ii, NCoR associates with the regulatory region of these genes in ChIP assays and this association is stronger in cells presenting higher levels of the corepressor; iii, NCoR depletion with siRNA increases promoter activity of the VEGF-C gene in transient transfection studies and iv, transfection with NCoR siRNA increases endogenous transcript levels of VEGF-C and VEGF-D. The gene discussed is NCOR1; the disease is breast cancer.