CALCA and neoplasm: To further extend our previous studies22 on the prevalence of CALCA gene expression in primary human lung tumours, we first evaluated the level of the calcitonin (CT) transcript in tumours from 28 additional non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) patients and allogeneic normal thyroids, used as a reference, by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR).