Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2016 Jan 7;35(1):1-11.
doi: 10.1038/onc.2015.99. Epub 2015 Apr 20.

Emerging strategies to effectively target autophagy in cancer

V W Rebecca  1 , R K Amaravadi  1
Affiliations
Review

Emerging strategies to effectively target autophagy in cancer

V W Rebecca et al. Oncogene. .

Abstract

Autophagy serves a dichotomous role in cancer and recent advances have helped delineate the appropriate settings where inhibiting or promoting autophagy may confer therapeutic efficacy in patients. Our evolving understanding of the molecular machinery responsible for the tightly controlled regulation of this homeostatic mechanism has begun to bear fruit in the way of autophagy-oriented clinical trials and promising lead compounds to modulate autophagy for therapeutic benefit. In this manuscript we review the recent preclinical and clinical therapeutic strategies that involve autophagy modulation in cancer.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Autophagy regulators and points of intervention. (a) Autophagy occurs through a multistep process that includes four control points: initiation, nucleation, maturation, and lysosomal fusion and degradation of autophagosome contents. Successful autophagy results in the recycling of nutrients into the cytoplasm. (b–e) Autophagy is regulated on multiple levels with four major classes of regulation including posttranslational, transcriptional, epigenetic and metabolic regulation. Potential druggable targets are depicted (red star) with a promise to better modulate autophagy than strategies currently being implored.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. Zou CG, Ma YC, Dai LL, Zhang KQ. Autophagy protects C. elegans against necrosis during Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2014;111:12480–12485. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Chen M, Hong MJ, Sun H, Wang L, Shi X, Gilbert BE, et al. Essential role for autophagy in the maintenance of immunological memory against influenza infection. Nat Med. 2014;20:503–510. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Deretic V. Autophagy in tuberculosis. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Med. 2014;4:a018481. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Xu X, Araki K, Li S, Han JH, Ye L, Tan WG, et al. Autophagy is essential for effector CD8(+) T cell survival and memory formation. Nature Immunol. 2014;15:1152–1161. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Rao S, Yang H, Penninger JM, Kroemer G. Autophagy in non-small cell lung carcinogenesis: a positive regulator of antitumor immunosurveillance. Autophagy. 2014;10:529–531. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types

Substances