We examined this issue by reducing the prevalence of breast cancer samples (i.e., we only used a half number of breast cancer patients, including 606/1212 randomly selected patients), and we identified a new signature including 7 genes CDK1, AP1S1, CASP3, MAP1LC3A, SNCA, MAPT, and GSK3B (Supplementary Fig. 7 in Additional file 2). This evidence concerns the gene CASP3 and breast cancer.