The elevated NQO1 expression in various cancers correlates with tumor progression and chemotherapeutic resistance (Glorieux et al., 2016), which has been exploited for developing tumor-selective prodrugs (Qu et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2022) and molecular imaging agents (Peng et al., 2022; Khan et al., 2024). This evidence concerns the gene NQO1 and neoplasm.