Previous studies have demonstrated that high expression of insulin-like growth factor receptor significantly promotes bladder cancer invasion and metastasis through pathways such as the AKT and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways (Metalli et al., 2010; Safarinejad et al., 2011) and plays an important role in lung cancer, breast cancer and other tumor proliferation (Selinski et al., 2012; Szarvas et al., 2012). Here, WNK2 is linked to lung cancer.