Animal models have been used to elucidate Pten functions in developing neuronal (Backman et al., 2001; Cantrup et al., 2012; Groszer et al., 2001; Kwon et al., 2006; Tachibana et al., 2016), skeletal (Hsieh et al., 2009) and vascular (Hamada et al., 2005) lineages, amongst others, as well as to determine the role of PTEN as a tumour suppressor (Carnero and Paramio, 2014). This evidence concerns the gene PTEN and neoplasm.