MAL2 and breast cancer: Song et al. (2021b) showed that USP18 post-translational deubiquitination up-regulates FTO protein expression, while FTO promotes BC occurrence and progression via its demethylase activity on PYCR1 to stabilize its transcript. Thus, the UPS18/FTO/PYCR1 signaling network could act as a potential therapeutic target for BC. In addition, FTO regulates the MALAT/miR-384/MAL2 axis via m6A RNA modification to initiate BC. Thus, FTO has the potential to be a prognostic biomarker for BC (Tao et al., 2021).