EGF and neoplasm: EGF binds to the extracellular domain of EGFR and activates it, resulting in phosphorylation of the intracellular tyrosine kinase, which causes downstream a series of signaling pathways which involved in various stages of tumor progression, such as cell proliferation, angiogenesis, invasion, migration, metastasis, and apoptosis (Hong et al., 2014; Jacome et al., 2014; Yuan et al., 2017).