Genome-wide screening with a siRNA library has been employed to identify many novel regulators associated with diseases, such as the polo-like kinase 1 for cancer (Hu et al., 2009), β2 subunit of the coatomer protein complex for virus infection (de Wilde et al., 2015) and the dual-specificity tyrosine-(Y)-phosphorylation regulated kinase 1A for neurodegenerative diseases (Azorsa et al., 2010). The gene discussed is PLK1; the disease is cancer.