ACE2 and lung cancer: Consistent with findings from large-scale population-based observational studies, a laboratory-based study involving 131 RNA-sequenced human lung cancer tissues (54 samples of European ancestry individuals and 77 samples of Asian ancestry individuals) found that smokers expressed a significantly higher level of ACE2 compared to non-smokers in both populations, leading to a potentially heightened susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection (Cai, 2020).