Furthermore, correlation analysis showed that the mRNA expression of PBK and CD276 is positively correlated in our NPC cohort detected by qPCR (r = 0.45, n = 41, p = 0.0018, Fig. 2f) as well as in the NPC RNA-seq dataset (r = 0.32, n = 113, p = 0.0006, Fig. 2g). The gene discussed is PBK; the disease is nasopharyngeal carcinoma.