STAT3 and B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukemia: Accordingly, autocrine VEGF drives CLL cell survival and prevents drug-induced apoptosis [117,118] by interacting with VEGF-R2 and by upregulating STAT3 and the pro-survival protein Mcl-1 (a member of the BCL-2 family) [117,119,120,121] (Table 1).