Dey et al. (2016) demonstrated that BMI1 depletion induced mitophagy and cell death via necroptosis in an ovarian cancer cell line. The qRT-PCR results (Tables 3, 4 and Figure 3) suggest that enhanced changes in the transcript levels may be mediated by oxygen concentration rather than BMI1 silencing, and the impact of the latter is more evident at the protein level. The levels of transcripts for the NLRP3 inflammasome, BCL2, and NRF2 agree with the results of previous studies reported in HALI by our group (Waxman and Kolliputi, 2009; Kolliputi et al., 2010; Fukumoto et al., 2013). The gene discussed is BMI1; the disease is ovarian carcinoma.