TERT and cancer: Barthel et al. [49] recently examined telomere length, TERT expression and related genomic alterations in 31 cancer types derived from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) cohort of patients, and they found that the TERT promoter mutations, and focal amplification/rearrangements were intimately associated with acquisition of TERT expression and telomerase activity in tumors (Figs. 2 and 3).