Recent studies have provided support for the view that downstream effects of MITF (via APEX1) on apoptosis may be relevant to melanoma: Liu et al. (2009) showed that MITF-positive melanoma cell lines accumulated high levels of APEX1, and in another study, down-regulation of APEX1 using antisense resulted in apoptosis of melanoma cells in culture (Yang et al., 2005). The gene discussed is MITF; the disease is melanoma.