The potential cytotoxic effect of napabucasin on HCC cells was evaluated in terms of the proliferation ability of multiple human and murine HCC cell lines, and compared to that of oxaliplatin and the plant-derived STAT3 inhibitor cryptotanshinone (Liu et al., 2017; Qin et al., 2017; Ji et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019). The gene discussed is STAT3; the disease is hepatocellular carcinoma.