On the other hand, as shown in Supplementary Table 2, when patients with benign conditions were used as the control population in the validation group, the sensitivity of MIC-1 for detecting early stage lung cancer was 65.3%, which is significantly superior to Cyfra21-1 (31.2%), NSE (3.5%), CA125 (9.5%), CEA (17.6%) and SCC (20.6%). This evidence concerns the gene GDF15 and lung cancer.