A pharmacological agent that coordinately upregulated GDF15 and EGR1 in a colon cancer cell line also activated transcription at a region in the GDF15 promoter containing 2 experimentally validated EGR1 binding sites, suggesting that EGR1 is a direct transcriptional regulator of GDF15 (Fig. 1A) (13). Here, GDF15 is linked to malignant colon neoplasm.