•Produced by lung cancers to drive growth [141,145]•Lung cancers express estrogen receptors [145,146]•Induces overexpression of CXCL12/CXCR4 pathway to support tumor growth and metastasis [147,148,150,151]•Inhibits p53 through DNMT1 [152]•Has antitumor roles via regulating NFkB [156]•Increases PD-L1 expression [157,160]. Here, CXCL12 is linked to lung cancer.