Until recently, the ADAMs and ADAMTS genes were relatively understudied in brain tumours (and other cancers), however, recent reports have suggested roles for ADAMTS-4, TS-5 (Held-Feindt et al, 2006; Nakada et al, 2005) and ADAM-12 (Kodama et al, 2004) in GBM, where these proteases are overexpressed. Here, ADAM12 is linked to cancer.