Wang L, et al. - Considering their recent study revealing recurrent chromosomal losses and somatic mutations of genes in the Hippo pathway in mucinous tubular and spindle cell carcinoma (MTSCC), researchers undertook an integrative analysis of 907 renal cell carcinoma (RCC) samples (combined from The Cancer Genome Atlas and in-house studies) and the Knepper data set of microdissected rat nephrons. Findings indicated that in MTSCC, VSTM2A and IRX5 are novel cancer-specific and lineage-specific biomarkers. On assessing their expression by RNA in situ hybridization (ISH) in 113 tumors [including 33 MTSCC, 40 type 1 papillary RCC, 8 type 2 papillary RCC, 2 unclassified RCC, 15 clear cell RCC, and 15 chromophobe RCC], they realized that VSTM2A had better diagnostic efficacy than IRX5, and may thus assist as a potential diagnostic marker to distinguish tumors with overlapping histology. Additionally, results indicate that MTSCC shows an overlapping phenotypic expression pattern with the loop of Henle region of normal nephrons.