VDAC1 and cancer: Thus, VDAC1 over-expression in CLL can function as double-edged sword, on the one hand providing metabolic advantages to cancer cells and binding sites for over-expressed anti-apoptotic proteins, yet on the other hand, by interfering with anti-apoptotic protein binding to VDAC1, over-expressed VDAC1 displays pro-apoptotic activity, encouraging cell death [14,16,17,18,19,20,22,23,24,26,27].