In human cancers, the anti-apoptotic proteins (e.g. Bcl-2, Bcl-XL, and Mcl1) are often upregulated in cancer cells, enabling them to evade apoptotic cell death and losing the capacity to undergo apoptosis in response to chemotherapeutic drugs (Wilson et al., 2006; Pan et al., 2016). Here, BCL2 is linked to cancer.