BCAT1 and nasopharyngeal carcinoma: Tönjes et al. (2013) reported high levels of BCAT1 in gliomas, and several subsequent studies demonstrated the central role of BCAT1 in tumor pathogenesis, including in breast cancer (Thewes et al., 2017), leukemia (Raffel et al., 2017), ovarian cancer (Wang et al., 2015), and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (Zhou et al., 2013). Notably, gliomas and ovarian cancer are also highly angiogenic tumors (Farhadi et al., 2005; Campos et al., 2007); accordingly, we assumed that BCAT1 might act as a tumor oncogenic factor through controlling tumor angiogenesis.