The involvement of OCTN1 in cancer metabolism, is probably unrelated to the poor ability of this transporter to mediate carnitine transport, however, it is interesting to know that OCTN1 is involved in the uptake of anti-cancer drugs (Table 1) such as Cytarabine (Drenberg et al., 2017), Camptothecin (Zheng et al., 2016), mitoxantrone and doxorubicin (Okabe et al., 2008). This evidence concerns the gene SLC22A4 and cancer.