Autophagy in Cancer Therapy: Progress and Issues
Pages 1-12
Jia-Jie Shi and Ling-Hua Meng

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.6000/1929-2279.2015.04.01.1

Published: 19 February 2015

Abstract: Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved intracellular self-digestion process, which mediates homeostasis in response to various stresses via degradation of damaged organelles or unnecessary proteins. It has been demonstrated that autophagy involves in tumorigenesis and progression. Autophagy serves either as tumor suppressor or promotor in a context-dependent way. It has been revealed in multiple studies that autophagy plays a pro-survival role upon treatment of anticancer drugs. Thus, combination of autophagy inhibitors with anticancer drugs may provide a desirable strategy to improve therapeutic efficacy. In this review, we summarize recent progress in the process and regulation of autophagy with a highlight in advances in the role of autophagy in cancer treatment. We also summarize some recent clinical outcomes of combinatorial use of autophagy inhibitors and anticancer drugs, and introduce latest discovered selective autophagy inhibitors. Some issues which should be paid attention to during the research to improve the clinical outcomes are discussed.