“…To reveal IL‐6 downstream signaling pathways that are responsible for the IL‐6‐mediated upregulation of PD‐L1/downregulation of NKG2D ligands in CRPC cells, we analyzed the expression/activation of molecules that have been previously reported to be involved in PD‐L1 regulation in C4‐2siIL‐6/sc and CWRsiIL‐6/sc cells. These included JAK1/2 (Bellucci et al ., ; Ikeda et al ., ), Stat3 (Fujita et al ., ; Marzec et al ., ), Akt‐mTOR (Lastwika et al ., ), NFκB (Gowrishankar et al ., ), mitogen‐activated protein kinase/ERK kinase (MEK), extracellular signal‐regulated kinase (ERK) (Yamamoto et al ., ), PI3K/Akt (Xu et al ., ), and MAPK (Noh et al ., ) pathways. We found many signaling pathways, including JAKs, Stat3, MAPK, MEK, Erk, were activated in IL‐6‐expressing cells compared to IL‐6‐knockdown cells (Fig.…”