Recent analysis of a metastatic pan-cancer cohort of 3504 patients, employing a strategy that relies on the presence of specific mutational footprints which are characteristic of a deficiency in HR (Nik-Zainal et al., 2016; Polak et al., 2017), revealed that mutational inactivation of the BRCA1, BRCA2, and PALB2 genes was the most common genetic cause of the observed HR signatures (Nguyen et al., 2020), indicative of their important role in tumor suppression. The gene discussed is PALB2; the disease is neoplasm.