INSM1 and neoplasm: The insulinoma-associated 1 (insm1) gene, which is first isolated from an subtraction cDNA library of insulinoma tumor cells, encodes a DNA-binding zinc finger transcription factor with SNAG repressor motifs in N-terminal as well as Cys2-His2 Zn finger motifs in C-terminal, and widely expresses in the developing nervous system, endocrine cells, pancreatic cells, and related neuroendocrine tumor cells (Goto et al., 1992; Xie et al., 2002; Jacob et al., 2009; Lan and Breslin, 2009; Jia et al., 2015b).