Beyond the canon: emerging modalities of regulated cell death

The field of regulated cell death (RCD) has expanded in punctuated bursts—from apoptosis and necroptosis to pyroptosis, ferroptosis, and more recently, triaptosis [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. In 2025, four landmark studies further reshaped this landscape by identifying mechanistically distinct death programs: necrosis by sodium overload (NECSO), spectosis, floatptosis, and mitoxyperilysis (Table 1 ). Each pathway features a unique initiating stimulus, morphological signature, and molecular execution mechanism, collectively illustrating how diverse physiological and pathological stresses can drive equally diverse cellular demise. This further expands the modalities of death originally described in the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death [ 4 ]. Here, we highlight the defining characteristics of these newly described modalities and discuss what they reveal about the evolving logic of RCD. Table 1 Comparative summary of four newly reported cell death modalities (2025). Full size table