Interestingly, in vitro experiments demonstrated that recombinant human BAFF upregulated EPB41L2, CDK6 and IL15 expression in CLL cells from 5 individual patients with CLL (Supplementary Figure 5D and Supplementary Table 1), while the expression of the remaining genes did not change following BAFF stimulation, suggesting that BAFF does not directly regulate those tumor-promoting genes (Supplementary Figure 5D). This evidence concerns the gene EPB41L2 and B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia.