Multicellularity, proteins and cancer

I am always interested in new ways of understanding cancer in the context of animals as multicellular organisms. This is a substantial bit of research on the evolution of multicellular animals with an interesting insight for cancer.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/11/startling-new-discovery-600-million-years-ago-a-single-biological-mistake-changed-everything/?tid=hybrid_collaborative_2_na

Yes - when I initially read the sciencedaily post about it I thought it was remarkable mostly for its revelation about the origins of multicellularity (in animals) - and hadn't really thought about the cancer angle until I saw the Washington Post article and the brief (and slightly odd) author video clip. I've always conceived of cancer as a problem of cooperation - or lack thereof in terms of the cancer cells ceasing to cooperate with the rest of the organism, but connecting this change to an ancient evolutionary switch that essentially permitted colonial protists to hook themselves together effectively, it's a slightly different way of thinking about cancer - rather than cancer just going rogue as it were, it's really cancer cells reverting to a unicellular (ancient) state. I think the hope is by identifying these mutations that they can be investigated in cancer cells to see if changes in these multicellular facilitating proteins are altered in cancer. What I don't have a sense of is whether these proteins have been identified as problems in cancer cells generally (or even any specific types)

The original paper is here and is open access. It's interesting to read the letter from the reviewers and the authors' response.

http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10147