It is tempting to speculate that the reason could be that the oncogene c-MYC, altered in a variety of cancers, also regulates SSSCA1. We did observe that the knockdown of SSSCA1 slightly reduced the cell proliferation of the cells (Supplementary Fig. 2a, full blots in Supplementary Fig. 5e) and that c-MYC efficiently bound to the promoter region of the SSSCA1 gene and regulated the expression at the mRNA and protein levels in the three cancer cell lines that were tested in this study (Supplementary Fig. 2b–d, full blots in Supplementary Fig. 5f). Here, ZNRD2 is linked to cancer.