TGFB1 and cancer: Accumulating evidence supports an association between dysregulated expression of TAK1 and many human diseases including cancer.[7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17] TAK1 was initially discovered as a protein that mediates TGFβ and bone morphogenetic protein signaling transduction.[31] Subsequent studies have shown that TAK1 plays a pivotal role in tumor microenvironment construction and thus affects cancer progression.[32] In this study, we compared the expression level of TAK1 between esophageal squamous tumor and normal tissues and found that TAK1 was expressed at lower levels in tumor tissues.