It mainly regulates biological processes, such as cell proliferation, differentiation, migration, etc. As a key component in the ERK1/2 signaling pathway, it plays a pro-cancer role in LSCC(Ma et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2023a) and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (Luo et al., 2022; Savic et al., 2023; Xu et al., 2024). The gene discussed is MAPK3; the disease is cancer.