For patients with inoperable or metastatic chondrosarcoma, no treatment options are available resulting in a 10-year survival rate below 30%.1 By using a focused RNAi screen targeting core apoptosis machinery components, we identified BIRC5 as an important player in chondrosarcoma survival and we here show that survivin inhibition using YM155 could be a promising novel treatment strategy for this malignant tumor. Here, BIRC5 is linked to cancer.