AXL and breast cancer: In human breast cancer epithelial cells, SLUG and SNAIL increase the expression of AXL, which indicates that AXL, as an important factor of the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) process, is involved in metastasis in cancer cells (Gjerdrum et al., 2010; Feneyrolles et al., 2014; Kong et al., 2020) (Figure 3C).