Thus, microfluidic cell pairing chips for investigating MSCs engulfment in BC cells have been engineered to demonstrate that primary breast carcinoma and distant metastases contain hybrid BC cell population that expressed EMT biomarkers, such as zinc finger e-box binding homeobox 1 (ZEB1) and smooth muscle actin (SMA) (Augimeri et al., 2023). Here, ZEB1 is linked to breast cancer.