Consistent with this finding, no significant differences were observed in the predicted cell-type proportions between the MSLN high vs MSLN low quartiles generated by the iterative method (Supplementary Fig. 3b), while the quartiles obtained from bulk profiling showed significant (p < 0.05, Wilcoxon rank-sum test) differences in several cell-type proportions—notably cancer—between groups (Supplementary Fig. 3c). This evidence concerns the gene MSLN and cancer.