Our previous findings by microarrays showed liprin-α1 knockdown to repress keratin intermediate filaments in metastatic UT-SCC-24B cell line [12], which suggests that keratin network compensates low endogenous vimentin expression in certain types of HNSCC (Additional file 10: Figure S7B-C). The gene discussed is VIM; the disease is head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.