While this suggests that not all genes of the pathway act as tumour suppressors, in tumours where VAMP7 or VAMP8 showed higher expression, other autophagy genes, such as ATG9B or GABARAP, often showed reduced expression (Supplementary Figure 4a and Supplementary Data set 2), and this upregulation could reflect a mechanism to compensate for a blockage of the pathway at another level. Here, VAMP7 is linked to neoplasm.