Breaking Out: Cancer Cells Cross the Barrier

This image shows the early stages of metastasis, when a single cell begins to divide into a small cluster of cancer cells that can5 eventually form a large metastatic lesion.  Many cancer cells that travel to distant organs face a dead end, perhaps surviving but never proliferating further.  But when cells that exhibit such dormant behavior are provided with the transcription factor p63 it allows them to begin the process of metastasis, the very early stages of which are depicted here.