Epithelial-mesenchymal transition: focus on metastatic cascade, alternative splicing, non-coding RNAs and modulating compounds.

Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a key process in embryonic development and metastases formation during malignant progression. This review focuses on transcriptional regulation, non-coding RNAs, alternative splicing events and cell adhesion molecules regulation during EMT. Additionally, we summarize the knowledge with regard to the small potentially druggable molecules capable of modulating EMT for cancer therapy.