SEMA5A and cervical cancer: Immunostaining demonstrated that SEMA5A was highly expressed in cervical cancer cells from stage IIb tumor tissues, comparable to that seen in nonsmall cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC), which was used as the positive control (Additional file 1: Figure S1B), but was expressed only at very low levels in stage Ia, Ib, and IIa tumor tissues (Fig. 1).