On 2017 May 21, Amanda Capes-Davis commented:

The authors tested against "two different cancer cell lines", HeLa and KB. Unfortunately this is an example of a misidentified cell line causing confusion. KB is known to be misidentified and is actually HeLa, from cervical cancer, not oral carcinoma as originally reported - so the authors are comparing two samples from the same tumour and individual.

A paper has just been published on the impact of KB in the scientific literature: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28455420.

Cell lines are increasingly used by medicinal chemists as models for treatment. The field must consider how to incorporate quality procedures for cell lines as part of manuscript submission if this problem is to be avoided.

A simple check against a list - in this case the ICLAC list of known misidentified cell lines - would have picked up the problem in this instance. See: http://iclac.org/databases/cross-contaminations/

To be confident that misidentification has not occurred, human cell lines should be tested for authenticity using short tandem repeat (STR) profiling. See: http://iclac.org/resources/advice-scientists/

All scientists who use cell lines as models should be aware of guidelines for good cell culture practice. For an example see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25117809

On 2017 May 21, Amanda Capes-Davis commented:

The authors tested against "two different cancer cell lines", HeLa and KB. Unfortunately this is an example of a misidentified cell line causing confusion. KB is known to be misidentified and is actually HeLa, from cervical cancer, not oral carcinoma as originally reported - so the authors are comparing two samples from the same tumour and individual.

A paper has just been published on the impact of KB in the scientific literature: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28455420.

Cell lines are increasingly used by medicinal chemists as models for treatment. The field must consider how to incorporate quality procedures for cell lines as part of manuscript submission if this problem is to be avoided.

A simple check against a list - in this case the ICLAC list of known misidentified cell lines - would have picked up the problem in this instance. See: http://iclac.org/databases/cross-contaminations/

To be confident that misidentification has not occurred, human cell lines should be tested for authenticity using short tandem repeat (STR) profiling. See: http://iclac.org/resources/advice-scientists/

All scientists who use cell lines as models should be aware of guidelines for good cell culture practice. For an example see: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25117809