SOX2 and cancer: It is, for example, highly expressed in pluripotent cells of the inner cell mass of the developing embryo, but SOX2 expression is also reported to be correlated with carcinogenesis, chemoresistance and maintenance of the stem cell-like phenotype in cancer cells (Liu et al. 2013; Weina and Utikal 2014; Herbert 2018; Chaudhary et al. 2019; Novak et al. 2020; Mamun et al. 2020).