BAX and breast cancer: To further elucidate the molecular mechanism through which the active fraction was able to induce apoptosis in breast cancer cells, we have examined mRNA expressions of some genes involved in the intrinsic mitochondrial pathway such as p53, Bax, p38, and caspase-3; extrinsic death receptor pathways were analyzed though the expression levels of caspase-3 and caspase-8 (Table 2), as already performed in our recent paper [14].