Eventhough we found a statistically significant independent association between Smurf2 and CNKSR2 expression with progressive breast tumor cases by means of descriptive analysis and logistic regression analysis, we further studied the association between expression status of Smurf2 relative to CNKSR2 in non-malignant (Normal/Benign) and malignant tumors (in situ and invasive breast carcinoma) (Additional file 1: Table S1, Tables 2 and 3). The gene discussed is CNKSR2; the disease is cancer.