At least part of the difference in susceptibility to mesothelioma is genetic: familial development of mesothelioma has been identified in patients with BAP1 syndrome (Carbone et al., 2013), as well as germline mutations in other DNA repair genes including PALB2, BRCA1, FANCI, ATM, SLX4, BRCA2, FANCC, FANCF, PMS1 and XPC CHEK2 (Betti et al., 2017), with known germline mutations identified in approximately 12% of patients (Panou et al., 2018). Here, CHEK2 is linked to mesothelioma.