Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center reported in Nature Cancer that disseminated lung adenocarcinoma cells enter a TGFβ-induced, atypical epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition that culminates in a round, low-tension morphology enabling immune evasion during dormancy. The round state reduces mechanical vulnerability to cytotoxic T cells and contributes to long-lived dormant metastases. Lead authors Joan Massagué and Zhenghan Wang describe biophysical changes — lower surface tension and loss of actin stress fibers — as central to immune escape. The team proposes that strategies to prevent cells from adopting the soft phenotype or to re-stiffen them could enable immune clearance of dormant cells before they reseed macrometastases.