Recently, it has been demonstrated that plasma TERT mRNA levels may serve as a minimally invasive marker for monitoring response to therapy in rectal cancer patients who underwent pre-operative chemoradiotherapy [24,25]; nevertheless, to our knowledge, the role of genetic TERT variants in constitutive telomere length and in TERT mRNA expression, and their associations with response to neoadjuvant therapy and outcome in rectal cancer patients, have not yet been investigated. Here, TERT is linked to rectal cancer.