Edited by: Claudia Tanja Mierke, Leipzig University, Germany
Reviewed by: Wei Chen, Stanford University, United States
This article was submitted to Cell Adhesion and Migration, a section of the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology
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Recently, we read a paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology “Anti-tumor Effect of Oleic Acid in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cell Lines via Autophagy Reduction.” Oleic Acid (OA) may be a promising drug candidate for the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, some problems existing in this paper need to be commented.
With great interest we read a paper “Anti-tumor Effect of Oleic Acid in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cell Lines via Autophagy Reduction” published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology (Giulitti et al.,
In the paper, OA inhibited the invasion and migration of HCC cells after treatment with OA (300 μM) for 48 h (Figure 6). However, authors demonstrated that OA significantly suppressed cell proliferation and induced cell death of HCC cells after incubation with the same concentrations (300 μM) of OA for the same time (48 h) (Figures 3–5). These results strongly suggested that the cause responsible for inhibition of migration and invasion of cells could be due to apoptosis induction of OA. Authors could treat the cells with OA at a lower concentration or for a short time when studying the inherent effects of drugs on the migration and invasion ability of cells without apoptosis induction. This made the results more convincing.
JL: study concept and design, data analysis, methodology, drafting manuscript, review and editing, and supervision.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.