ITGAV and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: To evaluate the mRNA expression of integrin family members (ITGA1‐11, ITGAV and ITGB1‐8) in the context of ESCC, expression profiles detailing the abundance of integrin transcripts within normal oesophageal and ESCC tumour tissues were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database (http://ualcan.path.uab.edu) and analysed37 (Figure S1A).