CXCR4 and cancer: Researchers reported that co-culturing of UCMSCs with EC1 cells (esophageal cancer cell line) might suppress cancer cell proliferation and induce apoptosis; consistently, they discovered that this strategy reduces stemness capacity of cancer cells due to down-regulated expression of stem cell markers such as KLF4, OCT2, SOX2, CXCR4, and CXCR7 (57).