HELLS and cancer: To improve diagnostic accuracy and specificity, the qMIDS assay had been designed to quantify mRNA levels of 14 FOXM1-associated genes (HOXA7, AURKA, NEK2, FOXM1B, CCNB1, CEP55, CENPA, DNMT3B, DNMT1, HELLS, MAPK8, BMI1, ITGB1 and IVL) involved in the regulation of cell proliferation [25], differentiation [17], ageing [26], genomic instability [16, 18, 24, 27, 28], epigenetic [18, 20] and stem cell reprogramming [17, 29–31] as a collective basis to measure cancer aggressiveness via an algorithm to compute a malignancy index [11].