Paolella et al. then showed that a drug called b-AP15, which was known to inhibit various deubiquitinases (D'Arcy et al., 2011), could inhibit the deubiquitinases in cancer cells that had experienced partial loss of SF3B1, and thus selectively kill these cells by reducing the amount of SF3B1 protein. This evidence concerns the gene SF3B1 and cancer.