BNIPL and nephronophthisis: Liu et al. (2012) showed that HORMAD2 mRNA expression was rarely expressed in the lung and HORMAD2 protein was detected more frequently in early-stage lung adenocarcinoma compared with advanced cancers. The nephronophthisis 3 (NPHP3) gene is associated with nephronophthisis and is necessary for the formation of primary cilia formation (Abdullah et al., 2017; Lee, Kim & Moon, 2019). BNIP-2-like (BNIPL) is an apoptosis-associated protein that interacts with cell proliferation-related proteins including BCL-2 and Cdc42GAP (Qin et al., 2003).