NEK2 and neoplasm: It has been reported in previous literature that NEK2, TOP2A, PLK1, CA4, and AURKB can play oncogenic or tumor suppressing roles in the progression of lung cancer (Bertran-Alamillo et al., 2019; Chen et al., 2020; Du et al., 2020; Gong et al., 2020; Shin et al., 2020).