The non-cytotoxic small molecule NPB does not inhibit BAD phosphorylation and forms colloidal aggregates
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Therapies that induce apoptosis in cancer cells are critically important in clinical oncology. In a recent Communications Medicine article 1 and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article 2 , a small molecule, NPB, was reported to induce cancer cell-specific cell death by inhibiting phosphorylation of the apoptotic protein, BAD. Using the same breast and ovarian cancer cell lines as the original reports, we endeavored to replicate these studies. We found that NPB did not inhibit BAD phosphorylation nor induce cell death. Furthermore, we observed that NPB forms large colloidal aggregates that are incompatible with the proposed mechanism of action, which posits that NPB binds to intracellular BAD. Thus, the prospect of NPB as a BAD-inhibitor that induces cancer cell apoptosis should be re-evaluated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".