Previous studies revealed that EPLIN negatively correlates with epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT), invasiveness, metastasis, poor prognosis, mortality and therapeutic resistance in human tumours such as prostate, breast, ovarian and oesophageal cancers [6,7,9,19,20], and that epidermal growth factor (EGF) could cause protein phosphorylation and turnover of EPLIN through an extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) signal pathway to influence EMT [21]. Here, EGF is linked to carcinoma of esophagus.