The Role of Autophagy and its Inhibition in Cancer Treatment
Summary
Autophagy serves as a simple garbage disposal mechanism to eliminate damaged and outdated components from cells so as to maintain cellular homeostasis.Autophagy defects have been associated with a wide range of disease. Tumorigenesis is a complex process.Recently, studies have shed light on investigating autophagy as a novel therapeutic target for cancer treatment. It has been found that autophagy can be either the suppressor of tumor growth at certain stages or the promoter of tumor survival at other stages.In this review, I will demonstrate the current understanding of the functional role and the inhibition of autophagy, in particular in cancers. It is hoped that there could be promising strategies of inhibiting autophagy to treat cancers or to compensate with other cancer treatments to enhance the efficacy of therapy.