PLAUR and cancer: Pursuing this hypothesis, we searched for switch genes that simultaneously anti-correlated with the four core TFs (Fig. 7, a) and found a list of 41 switch genes (Additional file 7) that includes: WNT5A whose activation can drive GBM stem-like cell differentiation [46]; PLAUR that plays a key role in glioma cell migration and invasion acting mainly on integrins, a family of cell adhesion molecules [47]; and the FOS like transcription factor FOSL1 that appears to be expressed in various cancer tissues and associated to glioblastoma aggressiveness, invasion, and metastasis [48, 49].