TERC and cancer: LAMP based assays have been successfully developed for a multitude of purposes, including genotyping HPV from cervical cytology samples (21, 22) but have not previously been combined with tumor markers associated with cervical cancer such as human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT), which is significantly overexpressed in cervical lesions with low to nil expression in normal tissue and detectable in at least 90% of cervical cancers (23, 24), TERC and c-MYC, which are widely recognised tumor markers (25–28) for early detection of cancer.