Liang et al. (2018) revealed that autophagy upregulated VEGFA expression in lung cancer cells via activation of the JAK2/STAT3 pathway (Liang et al., 2019). Related research also showed that the activation of autophagy then mediated VEGFA upregulation by activating the SRC/STAT3 pathway (Xu et al., 2016). Here, STAT3 is linked to lung cancer.