BIRC5 and cancer: Growing number of publications are correlating survivin with negative tumor prognosis [17, 70, 71] Survivin is expressed in the vast majority of human cancers, including head and neck, laryngeal, esophageal, lung, breast, ovarian, gastric, central nervous system, colorectal, bladder, pancreatic, prostate, uterine, hepatocellular, and renal cancers, as well as melanoma and soft tissue sarcomas [72, 73].