BIRC5 and breast cancer: Several lines of evidences suggests that the expression of STAT3 regulated genes such as survivin, Bcl-2, Bcl-xL confers resistance to apoptosis in human breast cancer cells (Gritsko et al., 2006) and it has been reported that these anti-apoptotic genes play an important role in the development of chemoresistance mechanisms (Tu et al., 1998; Kannaiyan et al., 2012; Sikka et al., 2014).