Now, in eLife, Scott Lowe and colleagues from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Hannover Medical School and the University of Michigan – including Geulah Livshits as first author – report how a subunit of SWI/SNF, called Arid1a, is involved in the development of pancreatic cancer (Livshits et al., 2018). The gene discussed is ARID1A; the disease is familial pancreatic carcinoma.