Zhou et al. (2020) found OTUB1 is overexpressed in RCC tissues and cell lines, which is associated with the poor prognosis of RCC patients. Knocking down OTUB1 inhibits cell viability and proliferation as well as migration and invasion. FOXM1, a previously identified substrate of OTUB1 (Wang et al., 2016), mediates this effect of OTUB1 in RCC. Overexpressing FOXM1 rescues the defects in OTUB1 knockdown RCC cells. The authors show FOXM1 upregulates the expression of ECT2 (epithelial cell transforming 2), which mediates the effect of OTUB1 and FOXM1 (Zhou et al., 2020). The gene discussed is OTUB1; the disease is renal cell carcinoma.