Similarly, during early stages of lung adenocarcinoma metastasis, these cancer cells experience an epithelial-like collective invasion and are surrounded by vimentin-positive cancer-associated fibroblasts31,32, which could also be adapted by an intermediate partial EMT program2, thus further strengthening the idea that cooperation between cancer cells and normal fibroblasts can contribute to tumour collective migration and worse clinical outcome. This evidence concerns the gene VIM and cancer.