A recent study showed that RBM47 inhibited proliferation in papillary thyroid carcinoma by stabilizing the lncRNA SNHG5, which in turn acted as a scaffold, binding with USP21 to regulate the expression of FOXO3, implying that USP21 is required for the tumor-suppressive role of RBM47 (Qin et al., 2022). Here, USP21 is linked to thyroid gland papillary carcinoma.