Our results implicate that both in intestinal tumours derived from spontaneous Apc loss and chemically induced colon tumours, cancer cells can directly recruit surrounding epithelial cells through Wnt-driven expression and secretion of the glycoprotein THBS1, which results in aberrant activation of a regenerative/foetal transcriptional programme mediated by the YAP pathway (Figure 6F), a driver of intestinal regeneration and tumorigenesis (Gregorieff et al., 2015). Here, THBS1 is linked to cancer.