VEGFC and non-small cell lung carcinoma: Luo et al. (2019) found that metformin induces apoptosis by promoting survivin degradation through the AMPK/PKA (protein kinase A)/GSK (glycogen synthase kinase)-3B pathway in NSCLC. Other research showed that the combination of metformin with cisplatin leads to decreased expression of vascular endothelial growth factor-C (VEGF-C) and VEGF receptor-3 (VEGFR-3) at the protein and mRNA levels (Chen and Chen, 2015).