As common regulators of TERT across all cancer types, we identified nine regulators: the two paired box proteins PAX5 and PAX8, the E2F factors 2 and 4, AR, BATF, SMARCB1, TAF1 and MXI1 (Table 1, all identified TFs are listed in Additional file 1: Table S3). Here, PAX5 is linked to cancer.