Many solid tumors including breast cancer can exhibit early dissemination and dormancy—in which cancer cells spread early in the disease process and survive long periods without detectable growth. These early disseminated tumor cells sometimes reactivate and lead to incurable metastatic disease years or even decades after curative-intent therapy for the primary tumor. We are just beginning to understand the role of the immune system in this process in part because of improvements in immunocompetent models as well as technological advances such as single-cell genomics and spatial transcriptomics. In this issue of Cancer Research, Bushnell and colleagues showed that NK cells are important in this context. The authors found that disseminated tumor cells and quiescent cells express higher levels of MHC 1 but are resistant to NK-cell–mediated immunity. The proposed mechanism involves the STING pathway and transcription factors Sox2 and Bach1. As other studies have highlighted the importance of T-cell immunity, this work reaffirms the importance and diversity of immune regulation of dormancy and suggests the need for future studies to flesh out mechanistic details and predict when each type of immunity is most important. See related article by Bushnell et al., p. 3337

中文翻译：

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乳腺癌播散性肿瘤细胞：它们是留下来战斗还是逃跑和躲藏？


许多实体瘤（包括乳腺癌）可能表现出早期播散和休眠，其中癌细胞在疾病过程的早期扩散并存活很长时间而没有检测到生长。这些早期播散的肿瘤细胞有时会在原发肿瘤的根治性治疗后数年甚至数十年重新激活并导致无法治愈的转移性疾病。我们才刚刚开始了解免疫系统在这个过程中的作用，部分原因是免疫功能活性模型的改进以及单细胞基因组学和空间转录组学等技术的进步。在本期《癌症研究》中，Bushnell 及其同事表明 NK 细胞在这种情况下很重要。作者发现，播散性肿瘤细胞和静止细胞表达更高水平的 MHC 1，但对 NK 细胞介导的免疫具有抵抗力。提出的机制涉及 STING 通路和转录因子 Sox2 和 Bach1。由于其他研究强调了 T 细胞免疫的重要性，这项工作重申了休眠免疫调节的重要性和多样性，并建议未来的研究需要充实机制细节并预测每种免疫何时最重要。参见 Bushnell 等人的相关文章，第 3337 页