SPTAN1 and neoplasm: Down regulation of ALAD is shown to be associated with poor prognosis in patients with breast cancer (Ge et al., 2017) whereas the existing data on non-erythroid spectrin αII (SPTAN1) suggest that overexpression of SPTAN1 in tumor cells reflects neoplastic and tumor promoting activity or tumor suppressing effects by enabling DNA repair through interaction with DNA repair proteins (Ackermann and Brieger, 2019).