Synthetic lethality of mRNA quality control complexes in cancer.

Synthetic lethality exploits the genetic vulnerabilities of cancer cells to enable a targeted, precision approach to treat cancer. Over the past 15 years, synthetic lethal cancer target discovery approaches have led to clinical successes of PARP inhibitors and ushered several next-generation therapeutic targets such as WRN, USP1, PKMYT1, POLQ and PRMT5 into the clinic. Here we identify, in human cancer, a novel synthetic lethal interaction between the PELO-HBS1L and SKI complexes of the mRNA quality control pathway.