PRL-3: a phosphatase for metastasis?

The PRL-3 phosphatase has joined the cancer arena very recently but is rapidly gaining interest both as a putative prognostic factor and as a therapeutic target for metastatic tumors. In this issue Guo and colleagues provide another key piece of information by showing that the catalytic activity of PRL-3 is required for experimental metastasis formation in mouse models. Here we summarize the current knowledge and discuss what remains to be done before PRL-3 could be considered as a target for diagnostics or therapeutics in the clinical setting of human cancer.