Dormancy and Survival Mechanism of Disseminated Tumor Cell and Its Role in Prevention and Treatment of Solid Tumor Metastasis

Abstract

The prevention and treatment of tumor metastasis can significantly improve the survival of patients with solid tumors. However, there is still a lack of effective drugs for the prevention and treatment of metastasis. The main reason is that the existing intervention and therapeutic drugs are difficult to achieve precise prevention and treatment of metastasis. Due to disseminated tumor cells (DTCs) already exist in the metastatic target organs of early postoperative patients, they are difficult to be detected with existing imaging techniques, and there is a lack of effective intervention drugs and efficacy evaluation systems. When DTCs grow to be detectable by imaging, the patient is already in the advanced stage of cancer, which has become a bottleneck restricting the breakthroughs in metastasis prevention and treatment. This paper reviews the dormancy and survival mechanism of DTCs in metastatic target organs and its intervention strategies, in order to promote the curative effect of metastasis prevention and treatment.

Keywords

• cancer
• disseminated tumor cells
• metastasis
• tumor dormancy
• solid tumor