CCN2 and breast cancer: For the purpose of determining whether YAP overexpression and activation were associated with a poor prognosis in breast cancer, we used SurvExpress [32] to evaluate the expression level of YAP and its downstream genes (CTGF, CYR61, AXL and MYC [35, 36]) in the TCGA invasive carcinoma dataset (Fig. 1d, left, patients were sorted in the ascending order of prognostic index).