STAT3 and neoplasm: Activation of the ERK pathway potentiates the activation of HIF-1α, NF-κB, and STAT-3, and these transcription factors are well known to be involved in the tumor growth and progression through the transcriptional regulation of various inflammatory genes, such as adhesion molecules, MMPs, and VEGF [26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40].