We thus focused on MKI67, which encodes Ki-67, a nuclear DNA-binding protein exclusively expressed in proliferating cells and thus widely used as a proliferation marker in cancer prognosis26, and we consistently found that the over-expression of MKI67 was correlated with reduced OS of LUAD patients according to Kaplan–Meier analysis based on TCGA data (log-rank P = 0.0002) (Fig. 2d). The gene discussed is MKI67; the disease is cancer.