AKT1 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: WDHD1 is highly expressed in tubular SCC tissues and is related to occurrence, progression, invasion, and metastasis of esophageal SCC (Liu et al., 2019) In addition, WDHD1 has been shown to induce the occurrence and further development of ESCC by activating PI3K/Akt signal transduction (Ertay et al., 2020).