Beware of thy neighbor: Senescent cancer cells feast on adjacent cells to persist.

Chemotherapy-resistant tumor cells are responsible for poor patient outcome. In this issue, Tonnessen-Murray et al. (2019. J. Cell Biol https://doi.org/10.1083/jcb.201904051) elegantly show that chemotherapy triggers macrophage-like features in surviving cancer cells, which in turn phagocyte normal and tumor cells alike to outlast dormancy and cause relapse.