AKT1 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: Mechanistically, prior studies in ESCC suggest that miR-107 targets oncogenic pathways including Cdc42-mediated cytoskeletal dynamics (Sharma, Saini & Sharma, 2017) and EGFR/PI3K/AKT signaling (Wei et al., 2024), which aligns with our observation of reduced miR-107 in advanced TNM stages and metastatic cases (Table 3).