BAX and breast cancer: Hale 1974 contains a metabolite called atranorin, which has antimicrobial properties, but a study of Harikrishnan et al. (2021) found that atranorin can also have anticancer properties–it significantly decreased the levels of anti-apoptotic proteins such as AKT, Bcl-2, Bcl-xL, and B-cell lymphoma 2-like protein (Bcl-w), while increasing the levels of pro-apoptotic protein Bax and caspases-3 activity in breast cancer cells.