In direct comparisons of processing steps in samples from patients with gastrointestinal cancer, Duffy et al. found that although the processing steps yielded relatively consistent results when comparing cancer patients to healthy subjects, the absolute numbers of CD14+HLA-DRlo/neg monocytes were significantly different when comparing whole blood staining to freshly isolated PBMCs in the cancer patient cohort (128). The gene discussed is CD14; the disease is cancer.