POU5F1 and cancer: Bruggeman et al. [14], who had observed the widespread expression of germ cell-specific (from embryonic to adult) genes in a wide database set from cancer cell lines and primary malignant tumours, proposed the involvement of such a soma-to-germ transition process in cancer evolution; the same was proposed by [5,8,34], while we have reported the induction of the embryonic stem cell-like markers (POU5F1, SOX2, NANOG) starting after DNA damage together with the polyploidy cycles [49].