Multiple intracellular signaling pathways are involved in cancer cell quiescence and activation, including the ERK-MAPK and PI3K-AKT-mTOR pathways, in which the ERKMAPK/p38MAPK ratio may be the key determining factor for tumor dormancy (Jo et al., 2008; Sosa et al., 2011; Gao et al., 2017). The gene discussed is MTOR; the disease is cancer.