CASP3 and hepatocellular carcinoma: RPS has been found to up-regulate the expression of pro-apoptotic proteins, such as active caspase-3, active caspase-9, and Bax in nonsmall cell lung cancer cells, hepatoma xenografts, ovarian cancer cells, and Hela cells, indicating that RPS induce apoptosis by mitochondrial apoptotic pathway [7, 12, 13, 17, 18].