HOXB7 and cancer: To understand the proliferative properties of AD-MSC-HOXB7, we focused on bFGF as the pivotal MSC mitogen and known transcriptional target of HOXB7 in cancer [32] bFGF was highly expressed in AD-MSC-HOXB7 (Fig. 3a), which was confirmed by measuring the levels of secreted bFGF protein in the AD-MSC-HOXB7 supernatants after 24 or 48 h in culture (Fig. 3b).