In particular, the reactivation or overexpression of developmental transcription factor genes has been repeatedly implicated in a variety of tumors, including TAL1 (SCL) and RUNX1 in leukemia (Porcher et al., 2017; Sood et al., 2017), SOX10 and MITF in melanoma (Johannessen et al., 2013; Kaufman et al., 2016) and GLI1 in glioma (Clement et al., 2007). Here, TAL1 is linked to glioma.