Previous work by Fredberg and colleagues had documented the importance of collective cellular behavior in asthma, showing that cells
comprising epithelial tissues — which line the surfaces of all organs throughout the body — can unjam and flow like a fluid, or jam and freeze like a solid.
When normal cells are transformed into cancer cells, this
epithelial tissue can take on the characteristics of embryonic
tissue, known as mesenchymal
tissue, which is
comprised of unspecialized cells that will develop, as the embryo matures, into more specialized
tissues.