LIFR and cancer: The methylation of 4 representative canine genes and their orthologous human genes, identified as three hypermethylated tumor suppressors (TP63, LIFR, and FOLH1) and one hypomethylated oncogene (WT1) in CMT, showed an anti-correlation with gene expression between normal and cancer in both dogs and humans (Fig. 3c and Additional file 1: Fig. S3).