STAT3 and cancer: It is most frequently associated with poor prognosis in a variety of human cancers (Lai et al., 2015), including gastric cancer (Yu et al., 2022), melanoma (Swoboda et al., 2021) and breast cancer (Siersbæk et al., 2020), etc. Activation of STAT3 has been shown to be inversely correlated with patient prognosis (Rajendran et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2013).