AKT1 and cancer: Li K. et al. (2019) showed that TGF-β-induced the activation of AKT rather than ERK1/2 in oral SCC and further illustrated that the non-Smad AKT-FOXO3a axis is essential to regulate the stemness of CSC. There is evidence from the results of different entities such as breast, cervical, and ovarian cancer that the canonical pathway as well as crosstalk of TGF-β are both important factors to regulate the cancer stemness (Chihara et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2017; Matsumoto et al., 2018; Li K. et al., 2019).