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Classifying collective cancer cell invasion

Most invasive solid tumours display predominantly collective invasion, in which groups of cells invade the peritumoral stroma while maintaining cell–cell contacts. As the concepts and experimental models for functional analysis of collective cancer cell invasion are rapidly developing, we propose a framework for addressing potential mechanisms, experimental strategies and technical challenges to study this process.

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Figure 1: Collective invasion in a clinical tumour specimen.
Figure 2: Patterns of cancer cell invasion.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Andrew J. Ewald and Roberto Mayor for helpful discussion and comments on the manuscript. Support was provided by the Dutch Cancer Foundation (KWF 2008-4031) and the Netherlands Science Foundation (NWO-VICI 918.11.626) to P.F., the NIH (CA104292 and CA76394 to J.L. and CA1000324 to J.E.S.) and the Chemotherapy Foundation to J.L. J.E.S. is the Betty and Sheldon Feinberg Senior Faculty Scholar in Cancer Research.

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Correspondence to Jeffrey E. Segall.

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Friedl, P., Locker, J., Sahai, E. et al. Classifying collective cancer cell invasion. Nat Cell Biol 14, 777–783 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb2548

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