MUC13 and infectious disease: However, these studies do not necessarily preclude the use of MUC13 as a biomarker of Plasmodium infection for two reasons: first, the fold-induction of MUC13 in other infectious diseases, outside of cancer, is much smaller than observed in this study (1.5–3 fold within the specific tissue assayed)21,36, and second, the clinical overlap between metastatic cancer patients, where MUC13 is often highly overexpressed, and malaria patients might be small.