The article Altered pathways and colorectal cancer prognosis, published at BMC Med journal by Víctor Moreno and Rebeca Sanz-Pamplona, discusses the results published by Slattery et al. in the article “Improved survival among colon cancer patients with increased differentially expressed pathways”. The authors showed a differential gene expression analysis between tumor tissue and adjacent normal tissue based on pathways. They reported cell cycle, pathways related to cellular metabolism and the Wnt signaling pathways as functions and pathways associated with prognosis in colorectal cancer. We think this is an interesting approach, since tumors with alterations in different genes but in the same pathway could share the same phenotype. However, we also believe that these results need to be validated in an independent data set to demonstrate its usefulness.