Veillonella is strongly associated with the development of several diseases, and has been found to promote the proliferation of lung adenocarcinoma (Zeng et al., 2023), whilst Veillonella activates macrophages to promote inflammatory responses via the LPS-TLR4 pathway (Zhan et al., 2022), for example, Veillonella correlated with the severity of radiation esophagitis (Lin et al., 2022), and inflammation is one of the factors leading to esophageal cancer, suggesting that Veillonella may indirectly contribute to esophageal carcinogenesis through inflammation. The gene discussed is TLR4; the disease is esophageal cancer.