Except in some studies (Pectasides et al., 2010; Mazibrada et al., 2014), presence of active nuclear STAT3 in HNSCC was invariably associated with poor prognosis (Masuda et al., 2010; Macha et al., 2011; Jinno et al., 2015; Gao et al., 2016; Lesinski et al., 2019). Here, STAT3 is linked to head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.