Fig. 7.

Extracurricular mechanism of TERT during invasion and tumour progression as seen by regulating miR500A. (I) Telomerase expression is reactivated in most tumours, and (II) TERT binds directly to the TBE sequences located at the promoter region of miR500A, resulting in the up‐regulation of miR500A and also the miRNAs located downstream of miR500A. As a compensatory mechanism, this regulation is fine‐tuned by the miR532, which acts as a negative regulator by repressing the hTERT mRNA. (III) The oncomiR miR500A represses post‐transcriptionally the mRNA of the tumour suppressor PTCH1, triggering a ligand‐independent aberrant Hedgehog signalling activation (IV) that contributes significantly to increase the invasiveness of tumour cells. (V) The chemical inhibition of TERT with BIBR 1532 could be a new strategy to fight cancer.