On 2015 May 31, Amanda Capes-Davis commented:

Please be aware that the KB cell line and any derivatives do NOT come from oral carcinoma. KB is known to be misidentified and is actually HeLa, from cervical carcinoma. It is important to test for misidentified cell lines; this can be done using authentication testing. Short tandem repeat (STR) profiling is a consensus test method that allows you to check for misidentification of human cell lines.

KB is widely used in the scientific literature as an oral cancer cell line. It would be impossible to manually add comments to all abstracts that use the cell line as an oral cancer model. Journals such as Nature now require authors to check against published lists of known misidentified cell lines, and report on authentication testing. This approach will help to address the problem.

The International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC) maintains a list of known misidentified cell lines at http://iclac.org/databases/cross-contaminations/.

On 2015 May 31, Amanda Capes-Davis commented:

Please be aware that the KB cell line and any derivatives do NOT come from oral carcinoma. KB is known to be misidentified and is actually HeLa, from cervical carcinoma. It is important to test for misidentified cell lines; this can be done using authentication testing. Short tandem repeat (STR) profiling is a consensus test method that allows you to check for misidentification of human cell lines.

KB is widely used in the scientific literature as an oral cancer cell line. It would be impossible to manually add comments to all abstracts that use the cell line as an oral cancer model. Journals such as Nature now require authors to check against published lists of known misidentified cell lines, and report on authentication testing. This approach will help to address the problem.

The International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC) maintains a list of known misidentified cell lines at http://iclac.org/databases/cross-contaminations/.