CD44 and neoplasm: The metastatic dynamics revealed that while higher and earlier metastatic rates were observed in the testing set of patients, particularly for those with a high frequency of CD44+/CD24- CSCs and those with < 2% of CD44+/CD24- CSCs and >19.5% of CD44-/CD24- tumor cells in the (C1 group) developed delayed distant metastasis, which peaked between 4 and 5 years post tumor resection (Figure 2D).