IL6 and cancer: Secondly, while we chose to use PHPS1 to selectively inhibit SHP2 activation in this study, it has been reported that when SHP2 activation occurs through multiple stimuli simultaneously including IL-1, IL-6 and numerous growth factors (insulin, EGF, PDGF and FGF), they produced a deleterious effect in cancer (Zhang et al. 2015), which is supportive of our findings.