IL6 and gastric cancer: As the IL-6-induced transcriptional stimulation of MMP-9/2 results from the activation of STAT3 via the JAK2/STAT3 pathway in gastric cancer and AGS cells [27,28], we tested the STAT3 phosphorylation level [29] in MKN-28 and AGS cells exposed to rIL-6 for different time points.