TWIST1 and cancer: Herein, we elucidated that the enforced expression of TWIST1 led to the upregulation of DPPA2. Consistent with the reports [12,13,14,16,21,22,48,49,50,51,52], our data also confirmed the correlation between the expression of cancer testis antigens, EMT markers, and pluripotency genes in ESCC, although further investigations are needed to determine the exact governing molecular mechanism.