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. 2015 Jul 19;370(1673):20140219. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2014.0219

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© 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Figure 9. — Foundations of multicellularity and cancer hallmarks. The hallmarks of cancer correspond closely to cheating in the foundations of multicellular cooperation. However, there are no currently recognized hallmarks that correspond to the breakdown of the division of labour in a multicellular body, suggesting that dysregulation of differentiation (**) may be a missing hallmark. Also, the hallmark of invasion/metastasis maps incompletely onto this framework (*). Invasion is partly a result of degradation of the extracellular environment, but metastasis is a more complex process that may require cheating in many of the foundations of multicellularity.