CALM1 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: In this study, we specifically focused on CALM1. CALM1 can regulate cell motility, differentiation, and proliferation (Chin and Means, 2000); increased CALM1 expression had previously been detected in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (Zamanian Azodi et al., 2018), prostate cancer (Adeola et al., 2016), and bladder cancer (Zhang et al., 2018) and has been reported to play an oncogenic role in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (Liu et al., 2021).