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Updated: Oct 7, 2025

An In Vitro System to Study Tumor Dormancy and the Switch to Metastatic Growth
Published on: August 11, 2011
Pattern recognition of tumor dormancy and relapse beyond cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic pathways
Masoud H Manjili1, Khashayarsha Khazaie2
1Department of Microbiology & Immunology, VCU School of Medicine, Massey Cancer Center, 401 College Street, Box 980035, Richmond, VA, 23298, United States.
None:
In this thematic issue, several mechanisms of tumor dormancy and relapse are discussed. The reviews suggest mutual interactions and communications between malignant cells and other cells in their niche during tumor dormancy. Nevertheless, a complete understanding of tumor dormancy remains elusive. This is because we are getting lost in details of cell-intrinsic and cell-extrinsic molecular pathways without being able to discover the pattern of tumor dormancy. Here, we discuss some conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches that facilitate pattern recognition of tumor dormancy, and propose that settling on certain biological scale such as mitochondria would be the key to discover the pattern of tumor dormancy and relapse.
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