TERT and Merkel cell skin cancer: Despite numerous existing data on telomerase/TERT in various types of human malignancies, little is known about these in MCC, and there has been so far only been one published report showing that telomerase activity was detected in 4/4 tumor biopsies from 4 MCC patients and in 3 of 4 cultured MCC cells derived from the above patients [28].