This involvement in cancer is not unheard for PUF proteins; canonical PUM1 and PUM2 are altered in 17 types of cancer tissues (Smialek et al., 2021), have been shown to sustain cell growth in acute myeloid leukemia by promoting the expression of FOXP1 (Naudin et al., 2017) and the protein Nop9 has been suggested as a prognostic marker for renal cancer (Silva et al., 2022). Here, NME2 is linked to cancer.