TERT and lung cancer: A subsequent study found that rs1051730 near CHRNA3 was strongly associated with smoking quantity and nicotine addiction as well as with lung cancer risk.30 With an enlarged sample size and pooling analysis, rs402710 and rs2736100 at 5p15.33 (CLPTM1L-TERT) were shown to be independently associated with lung cancer risk (r2 = 0.026).32–34TERT encodes telomerase reverse transcriptase, which plays an important role in maintaining the length and stability of human telomeres.