Letter to the editor regarding the article “Bazedoxifene is a novel IL-6/GP130 inhibitor for treating triple-negative breast cancer”

Abstract

With great interest, we read a paper in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment "Bazedoxifene is a novel IL-6/ GP130 inhibitor for treating triple-negative breast cancer." by Tian et al [1]. We would like to applaud the authors for finding the anticancer effect of bazedoxifene on breast cancer. However, there are some problems in this paper that need to be addressed. Authors found that bazedoxifene induced cell apoptosis using the Apo-ONE homogeneous caspase 3/7 assay after the treatment of bazedoxifene (10 μM) for 5 h (Fig. 3). Moreover, Fig. 4 shows that cell viability decreased markedly, which was less than 50% treating with bazedoxifene (10 μM). The same results also can be seen in Fig. 5. However, authors claimed that bazedoxifene (10 μM for 24 h) could inhibit cell invasion significantly without inducing any cell death (Fig. 8). The cell viability was almost 100% after the incubation of bazedoxifene (10 μM) for 24 h (Fig. 8B). These results were contradictory.