It has been reported that docetaxel [lung adenocarcinoma (Pan et al. 2014)], oxaliplatin [colorectal cancer (Wang et al. 2018) and lung carcinoma (Haruna et al. 2020)] and 5-FU [colon carcinoma cells (Cottone et al. 2015)] all induce tumour cell secretion of HMGB1. Here, HMGB1 is linked to colorectal cancer.