TWIST1 and cancer: TWIST1 is an attractive target for novel therapies: it is rarely expressed in adult tissues, reducing the chance of off-site effects [32], and it plays a role in multiple cancer processes correlated with poor outcome, such as metastatic spread, angiogenesis, resistance to apoptosis, drug resistance pathways, and cancer cell stemness (Fig. 1a) [7, 9, 11, 14, 33, 34].