A 2024 study by Zhao et al. found that hyperactivity of inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblasts was a marker of advanced-stage MF, with a proposed mechanism of bi-directional interaction in which tumor cells cause inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblast proliferation, thus improving malignant T-cells’ ability to metastasize via the IL-6/JAK2/STAT3/SOX4 or IL-6/HIF-1α/SOX4 pathways [41]. Here, SOX4 is linked to neoplasm.