Extracellular cytokines from tumor microenvironment (TME), such as TGF-β, IL-6 are sufficient to initiate stem-like status.2,6 Among the TME factors, neural signals have increasingly been recognized to facilitate cancer progression.7–9 For instance, norepinephrine,10 gamma-aminobutyric acid11 and glutamate12,13 have been found to enable invasive cancer phenotype, which is indicative of cancer stem-like properties. Here, TGFB1 is linked to cancer.