Tumor-promoting inflammation is an “enabling characteristic” of cancers, including ESCC [5, 63], and to date, a number of important murine models for inflammation-mediated ESCC have been developed, including mice with Klf4 overexpression, p120 catenin knockout, or conditional Sox2 knockout [7, 8, 65]. Here, SOX2 is linked to esophageal squamous cell carcinoma.