STAT3 and cancer: These findings not only validate the replicability of garcinol anti-GBM effect in vitro, in vivo and ex vivo using primary GBM culture cells, and enhance clinical or translational relevance, but also demonstrate, at least in part, that akin to stattic, garcinol inhibits the metastatic and stemness phenotypes of primary GBM culture cells by inhibiting the activation of STAT3/5A, which is consistent with results in Figure 4 and Figure 5 showing that garcinol inhibits metastasis, cancer stemness and tumor growth through enhanced hsa-miR-181d/STAT3 or hsa-miR-181d/STAT5A.