The authors reply: Comment on “The expression landscape of cachexia‐inducing factors in human cancers” by Freire et al

[...]we found that pancreatic cancer presented the highest number of upregulated secretome genes (1267) across all tumour types. FDR is recommended in high‐throughput experiments to correct random events that falsely appear significant, exerting robust control over the error rate even when the hypotheses have dependencies. 12 Thus, despite the fixed criterion of DEGs cut‐off used by the authors, the number of DEGs identified in their analyses includes many false positives. [...]considering the extremely high number of DEGs (~9000) found by the authors for each tumour type, nearly all cachexia‐inducing factors (CIFs) are altered. Previous pan‐cancer studies that used samples exclusively from the TCGA data set have provided a uniquely comprehensive, in‐depth, and interconnected understanding of several aspects of human tumours. 10,16–19 Thus, the lack of further validation does not negatively affect the value of our findings. [...]one must consider the broad spectrum of tumours that were compared by robust statistical analysis applied to integrate such big data, including 12 tumour types (4651 and 2737 tumour and normal samples, respectively).