OLA1 and cancer: In breast cancer and ovarian cancer, TGF-β/SMAD signaling up-regulates the expression of obg-like ATPase 1 (OLA1) and ST3GAL1 (a sialyltransferase), leading to accelerated EMT, enhanced cancer stem-like features, and the expression of anti-apoptotic proteins such as cleaved caspase 3, Bcl2-associated protein X (Bax) and Bcl-2 (Wu et al., 2018; Jalalirad et al., 2021).