We next used iPANDA, a bioinformatics software suite for qualitative analysis of intracellular signaling pathway activation based on transcriptomic data [16, 17], to assess the level of FAK pathway activation in current smokers (n=239) or never-smoker (n=91) patients with NSCLC (both adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma) derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas database. This evidence concerns the gene PTK2 and squamous cell carcinoma.