In view of the notion that CSC population is mostly responsible for tumor aggressiveness21, we used publicly available Oncomine database (www.oncomine.org) to obtain an overview of expressions of human lung cancer stem cell markers CD44 (Supplementary Fig. S1A,B) and CD133 (Supplementary Fig. S1C-E) in clinical specimens which demonstrated higher expression of both the markers in lung adenocarcinoma compared to control samples. Here, CD44 is linked to neoplasm.