SPARC and neoplasm: SPARC was a matricellular protein modulating cell-matrix interactions and was found up-regulated in tumor stroma and associated with poor prognosis in many cancer types, including colorectal cancer (Kurtul et al., 2017; Drev et al., 2019), pancreatic cancer (Vaz et al., 2015), cervical carcinoma (Shi et al., 2016), and non-small cell lung cancer (Koukourakis et al., 2003).