VEGFA and central nervous system cancer: Several researchers characterized glioma CSCs as a cell population with impaired gene expression rather than certain genomic alterations, for instance, hyperactivity of the cell cycle genes (IGFBP5, VEGFA, SLC2A3, LGALS3, FAM115C, MT1X, UBC, C4orf3, FAM162A, PPP1R15A, EEF1A1, FTL; Patel et al., 2014), increased expression of neurodevelopmental TFs (POU3F2, SOX2, SOX4, SOX11, SALL2 and OLIG2; Tirosh et al., 2016), or NSC-related genes (NFIB, ASCL1, CHD7, CD24, BOC and TCF4; Suvà et al., 2013) were proposed to confer stem-like properties to malignant cells enabling them to convert to CSCs.