TERT and cancer: There are several mechanisms that lead to TERT activation that vary among the different types of cancers and include: chromosomal rearrangements involving the TERT gene [19–22], TERT transcriptional activation via transcription factor binding [23–25], miRNA regulation [26], DNA methylation changes at different elements of the TERT promoter [27, 28] and finally TERT promoter single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and recurrent mutations [6, 7, 29, 30].