Liu WB, et al. - Researchers investigated the role of TMEM196 gene hypermethylation and downregulation as promising biomarkers for early diagnosis and prognosis in lung cancer, by using methylation-specific PCR, Kaplan–Meier survival curves and Cox regression analysis. They analyzed lung cancer tissues, plasma and sputum samples, and normal tissues. Lung cancer patients (AUC = 0.905) could be strongly differentiated from normal subjects by TMEM196 high methylation. TMEM196 methylation was identified as an independent prognostic marker in lung cancer, as seen on multivariate models. Patients with low TMEM196 expression vs TMEM196-high patients had a significantly poorer overall survival. Low TMEM196 expression in tumor tissues was identified to be predictive of poorer survival.