TEK and neoplasm: Tie2 is a tyrosine kinase receptor and Tie2-expressing macrophages have been generally reckoned as a predictive marker of poor prognosis in multiple cancers, attributed to the influence to angiogenesis, vascular remodeling in tumor entity, and macrophage differentiation (Matsubara et al., 2013; Mao et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2018).