Some cells start dying, stop halfway, and come back tougher

I keep a mental list of things that sound like they were made up for a novel, and this one went straight on it.

Apoptosis is supposed to be a one-way trip. A cell gets a signal that it's damaged or not needed anymore, the machinery switches on, and the cell takes itself apart in an orderly way. That's the textbook version. Researchers at the Weizmann Institute have now found cells that start the process and then don't finish it.

They worked with fruit fly larvae and damaged the tissue on purpose. Some of the cells there had the molecular markers you'd expect in a dying cell, but they were still alive. Instead of falling apart, they started dividing fast and sending out signals that told the cells around them to grow and repair. The team calls them DARE cells. In their experiments, those cells replaced close to half of the damaged tissue within 48 hours. The work is published in Nature Communications.

The part I can't quite get past is what came next. The cells descended from those survivors were more resistant to damage afterwards. That's good news if you want to understand how tissue regenerates. It's a lot less good if the cell that walked back from apoptosis happens to be a cancer cell that just sat through chemotherapy, because that would be one plausible reason some tumors come back stronger than before.

So the same trick is a repair mechanism and a problem at the same time. I'd like to see whether this holds up in mammals.

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260917003722.htm