IL6 and metastatic neoplasm: Interestingly, several genes in this cluster or their homologs involved in angiogenesis and inhibition of apoptosis have previously been associated with metastatic tumor progression in murine SCC or human HNSCC (IL6, IL8, YAP1, and BIRC2) [9,22-24,30,33,37,38,47-49], and shown to be regulated by NF-κB [22-25,37,49].