We recently identified in triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive breast cancer subtype that disproportionately affects African American women (Brewster et al., 2014), that expression of epigenetic reader methyl binding domain protein 2 (MBD2), specifically the alternative mRNA splicing variant MBD2_v2, is dependent on reactive oxygen species (ROS) and necessary to maintain the cancer stem cell phenotype (Bao et al., 2017). The gene discussed is MBD2; the disease is triple-negative breast carcinoma.