We first tested if mutations in ERCC5 were associated with cancer patient survival by analyzing 26,735/42,027 informative patients representing malignancies in >30 tissues from 158 non-redundant studies; of these, 187 patients with ERCC5 mutations displayed a shorter life span (56.5 median months survival) than 26,552 patients without ERCC5 mutations (106 median months survival, logrank test p-value = 3.2 × 10–4) (Figure 1A; Supplementary Table S1). This evidence concerns the gene ERCC5 and cancer.