MSI2 and cancer: Previous studies reported two small molecules Ro 08-2750 and (-)gossypol targeting MSI2 in colon cancer cells (Clingman et al., 2014; Lan et al., 2018; Minuesa et al., 2019); however, no small molecule has been validated for the requirement of MSI2 for its anti-cancer activities, especially for gossypol that was identified as an inhibitor of oncoprotein BCL2 previously (Zeng et al., 2019).