{"entity":{"id":"paper-phan-nat-rev-cancer","kind":"paper","name":"The dormant cancer cell life cycle","aka":[],"tldr":"Paper cited by one pathway page and one bottleneck page, indexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 32488200 and published in Nature Reviews Cancer; the citing pages link this DOI, which is how the record was matched.","summary":"The success of targeted therapies and immunotherapies has created optimism that cancers may be curable. However, not all patients respond, drug resistance is common and many patients relapse owing to dormant cancer cells. These rare and elusive cells can disseminate early and hide in specialized niches in distant organs before being reactivated to cause disease relapse after successful treatment of the primary tumour. Despite their importance, we are yet to leverage knowledge generated from experimental models and translate the potential of targeting dormant cancer cells to prevent disease relapse in the clinic. This is due, at least in part, to the lack of adherence to consensus definitions by researchers, limited models that faithfully recapitulate this stage of metastatic spread and an absence of interdisciplinary approaches. However, the application of new high-resolution, single-cell technologies is starting to revolutionize the field and transcend classical reductionist models of studying individual cell types or genes in isolation to provide a global view of the complex underlying cellular ecosystem and transcriptional landscape that controls dormancy. In this Perspective, we synthesize some of these recent advances to describe the hallmarks of cancer cell dormancy and how the dormant cancer cell life cycle offers opportunities to target not only the cancer but also its environment to achieve a durable cure for seemingly incurable cancers.\n\nIndexed on Europe PMC as PubMed record 32488200 (DOI 10.1038/s41568-020-0263-0). Matched by DOI alone: one pathway page and one bottleneck page cite this DOI among their external links (the pages are listed under Related), and this page was written so that the citation resolves inside OnCo. No figure has been checked by an editor.","asOf":"2026-09-22","links":[{"label":"Nat Rev Cancer 2020","url":"https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-020-0263-0"},{"label":"PubMed","url":"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32488200/"},{"label":"Europe PMC","url":"https://europepmc.org/article/MED/32488200"}],"tags":["europepmc-ingest"],"related":["tumor-dormancy","b-dormancy-mrd"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":[],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":[],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":["nature-reviews-cancer"],"dependsOn":[],"notes":[],"journal":"Nature Reviews Cancer","year":2020,"doi":"10.1038/s41568-020-0263-0","pmid":"32488200","authors":"Phan TG, Croucher PI","paperType":"review","findings":[],"whatItMeans":"One pathway page and one bottleneck page on OnCo cite this paper by its DOI; this record gives the citation a page of its own so a reader can follow it without leaving OnCo. Read the abstract above alongside the citing pages listed under Related; the record was created automatically from the Europe PMC entry and its figures have not been checked by hand.","caveats":["Matched to the citing OnCo records by DOI alone; the summary reproduces the Europe PMC abstract and no figure has been verified against the full paper."]},"route":"/key-papers/paper-phan-nat-rev-cancer/","neighbours":{"pathway":[{"id":"tumor-dormancy","kind":"pathway","name":"Tumour dormancy","route":"/pathways/tumor-dormancy/"}],"bottleneck":[{"id":"b-dormancy-mrd","kind":"bottleneck","name":"Dormant cells and minimal residual disease","route":"/bottlenecks/b-dormancy-mrd/"}],"journal":[{"id":"nature-reviews-cancer","kind":"journal","name":"Nature Reviews Cancer","route":"/journals/nature-reviews-cancer/"}]}}