Mechanisms of disseminated cancer cell dormancy: an awakening field

By M. Sosa, P. Bragado, J. Aguirre-Ghiso. Nature Reviews. Cancer, 2014

1,049 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Metastases arise from residual disseminated tumour cells (DTCs). This can happen years after primary tumour treatment because residual tumour cells can enter dormancy and evade therapies. As the biology of minimal residual disease seems to diverge from that of proliferative lesions, understanding the underpinnings of this new cancer biology is key to prevent metastasis. Analysis of approximately 7 years of literature reveals a growing focus on tumour and normal stem cell quiescence, extracellular and stromal microenvironments, autophagy and epigenetics as mechanisms that dictate tumour cell dormancy. In this Review, we attempt to integrate this information and highlight both the weaknesses and the strengths in the field to provide a framework to understand and target this crucial step in cancer progression.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Molecular Biology, Oncology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/814511895e260319027a91250fb9ab675fba1eb9

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In Epidemiology

1. Sang Hun Lee
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Citations in the corpus

• Revisiting the hallmarks of cancer. (2017, neutral): “[140] Sosa MS, Bragado P and Aguirre-Ghiso JA.”
• Apoptosis, autophagy, necroptosis, and cancer metastasis (2015, background): “Disseminated tumor cells that are unable to form firm ECM contacts in a foreign microenvironment may transform to enter dormancy [104], which may allow the tumor cells to survive for years or decades at distant sites without developing into secondary tumors while retaining the ability to metastasize”
• EMERGING BIOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES OF METASTASIS (2017, neutral): “Dormancy programs (Figure 3B) can be initiated from either an active response to signals encountered in the new tissue microenvironment or from an absence of contextual cues that carcinoma cells previously depended on while residing in their sites of origin within primary tumors (Giancotti, 2013; So”
• The Roles of Autophagy in Cancer (2018, background): “In primary cancer cells, autophagy is induced by hypoxia and nutrient deprivation and protects against cell necrosis and inflammation [100,101,102].”
• Autophagy and autophagy-related proteins in cancer (2020, background): “During the early stage of metastasis, the autophagy may act as a suppressor of metastasis by preventing tumor necrosis and restricting inflammatory cell infiltration [243]; on the other hand, in the advanced stages of metastasis, the autophagy may act as a promoter of metastasis by promoting dissemi”