There are examples where USP16 was down-regulated or mutated in leukemias and other human cancers, such as lung adenocarcinoma and hepatocellular carcinoma, which might contribute to the inability of cancer cells to resolve the DNA repair process (Fernandez et al., 2004; Gelsi-Boyer et al., 2008; Qian et al., 2016), but these are rare and the gene is ubiquitously expressed (data from FANTOM5 project1) and only rarely mutated (data from The Cancer Genome Atlas2). Here, USP16 is linked to cancer.