BAX and neoplasm: Previous studies demonstrated the effectiveness of gold nanoparticles in damaging cancer cells (Xu et al., 2012; Li et al., 2017; Lu et al., 2017; Lopez-Chaves et al., 2018) via several pathways, including: cell death, stimulation of pro-apoptotic protein (Bax) expression, inhibition of tumor cells migration and motility (Lu et al., 2017), suppression of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (Li et al., 2017) and oxidative reactive species (ROS) production after short-exposure time (Lopez-Chaves et al., 2018).