Overview
Why dormant cancer cells matter, how the section is organised, and what questions it helps answer
Dormancy matters because recurrence risk is not driven only by what is visible on a scan.
It is also driven by what survives treatment quietly.
That includes residual, micrometastatic, and slow-cycling disease that may stay controlled for a long time before reactivating.
Why this section exists
The older cancer model was often simple.
Find the lesion.
Kill the lesion.
Dormancy research adds a more useful question:
should the goal be to kill it now
keep it deeply dormant
wake it and then kill it
Inflammation, stress signalling, immune surveillance, and tissue niche biology all affect that decision.
Start here
The main practical takeaway
Dormancy science does not replace standard oncology.
It changes the quality of the questions.
It helps people ask whether a plan is trying to eradicate visible disease, manage recurrence risk, reduce reactivation triggers, or some combination of all three.
That is especially useful when disease is tiny, stable, hard to detect, or biologically ambiguous.
Key References
Novel Strategies to Combat Dormant Disseminated Tumor Cells
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8111294/
Cancer cell dormancy: An update to 2025
https://bmrat.biomedpress.org/index.php/BMRAT/article/download/994/2044
Cellular Dormancy in Cancer: Mechanisms and Potential Targeting
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10372609/
Targeting cancer cell dormancy
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11038906/