Epigenetic changes can cause cancer cells to lose normal function and gain traits like survival and metastasis.

“So it's so-called state change where they occupy a different location State of development, basically, compared to their normal cell counterparts. So if we're talking about a pancreas cell, endocrine cell in the pancreas becoming a cancer, it moves away from its differentiated, fully mature neighbor's and does so in a way that's important in terms of its cancer biology, makes it more hardy, makes it be able to survive insults, makes it be able to adopt programs that it's not supposed to have, like traveling, as in becoming metastatic.”