Our results demonstrate that these trends of association of RKIP and BACH1 with clinical outcomes are largely consistent across cancer types as well as survival metrics (overall survival, progression-free survival, disease-free survival), highlighting their behaviour as members of two antagonistic ‘teams’ (figure 6) playing a tug-of-war—a pro-metastatic one (EMT, stem-like, drug-resistant) and an anti-metastatic one. Here, BACH1 is linked to cancer.