Several reports have indicated that the up‐regulation of osteopontin (Wai & Kuo, 2008; Weber et al., 2010), survivin, an apoptosis inhibitor (Dong et al., 2015), and cathepsin S (Zhang et al., 2015) is associated with tumour cell migration, invasion, progression and metastasis. The gene discussed is BIRC5; the disease is neoplasm.