Pancreatic cancer cells have been reported to be resistant to starvation and gemcitabine treatment owing to the NUPR1/RELB/IER3 survival pathway, and CDKN1A/p21 phosphorylation and relocalization from the nucleus to the cytoplasm are important for breast cancer cell resistance to chemotherapeutic agents such as doxorubicin.(23) In this study, the phosphorylation and localization of p21 were also evaluated but no clear changes were observed (data not shown). Here, IER3 is linked to breast cancer.