In the study done by Chaffer et al. (2011), using basal-like breast cancer cells, non-stem cells were shown to spontaneously switch to stem-like cells in vitro and in vivo; this plasticity was later found to be regulated by ZEB1 (Chaffer et al., 2013) – a key regulator of EMT (Jia et al., 2017). The gene discussed is ZEB1; the disease is breast carcinoma.