Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Brain cancers, in particular glioblastoma (GBM), have incredibly poor prognosis and there are currently few effective treatments. Our understanding of the molecular defects associated with cancer has significantly increased over the past decade. Many of the commonly disrupted genes control cell proliferation and survival pathways. However, it is increasingly clear that genetic changes operate in a tissue-specific and developmental context and cancer can be viewed as a disease of aberrant cell differentiation. For some cancers, including GBM, cells with stem cell characteristics may initiate and/or sustain tumour growth. Therefore, knowledge and methods from developmental biology and stem cell biology are likely to provide new insights into the biology of this disease and lead to new therapeutic strategies.I will focus on a set of lineage-specific transcription factors with known expression within neural stem and progenitor cells, both in vitro and in vivo. My goal is to dissect their role in self-renewal and differentiation and how this is related to the cell cycle machinery and “classic” cancer pathways. How cell differentiation and cell proliferation programs operate in stem and progenitor cells is a fundamental question for both basic biology and cancer research.