POU5F1 and central nervous system cancer: To investigate the association between Oct-4 and tumor malignancy as well as patient prognosis in gliomas, we evaluated the mRNA expression of Oct-4 (POU5F1) in the TCGA dataset and found that patients with WHO grade IV tumors had higher Oct-4 expression than grade WHO II (p<0.001) and WHO III (p<0.01) tumors (Fig 1A).