PLEK2 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: PLEK2 expression has been demonstrated to be highly upregulated in several malignancies, and its knockdown leads to the inhibition of cancer cell proliferation, migration and invasion, including non-small cell lung cancer (Wu et al., 2020), gallbladder cancer (Shen et al., 2019), osteosarcoma (Liu et al., 2021), pancreatic cancer (Yang et al., 2021), gastric cancer (Wang et al., 2021a), and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (Wang et al., 2021).