eillance practices will be one important answer to curtail and limit the spread of these types of emerging infectious diseases. Dental care providers treat a broad range of adult, pediatric, elderly, healthy and impaired populations. As health care providers, we have a responsibility to protect the public. Maybe the time has come for dental health care providers to partake in the multidisciplinary task of disease tracking and reporting. With proper training, we would be able to shoulder a more active role in the discovery and containment of the next infectious pandemic. I believe our involvement would have a substantial impact and greatly benefit the health of all patients.


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found at: <http://f1000.com/reports/b/2/86>

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In normal cells, a tight coordination between cell adhesion and signaling exists, manifested by a dependence on anchorage for growth. As cancer cells often display anchorage-independent growth, the key question is, what is the nature of the changes in this coordination between adhesion and signaling in cancerous cells? Epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) describes a series of events originally recognized in embryogenesis and involves changes in epithelial cells that give rise to mesenchymal cells \[[@bib-001]\]. Elizabeth Hay described mesenchymal cells as "bipolar cells with a filopodia-rich front end capable of invading the extracellular matrix (ECM)...and at the very least, with motile morphology" \[[@bib-002]\]. While numerous changes in molecular markers occur during EMT, these are not universal to all EMT cases \[[@bib-002]\].

Many of the phenotypic changes occurring during EMT are reminiscent of those seen in adenocarcinoma cells during cancer progression, which involve an invasion of the ECM and movement away from the primary tumor to form distant metastases. This invasiveness is fundamental to both EMT in embryogenesis and malignant tumor development, and