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  • Review Article
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Autophagy as a target for anticancer therapy

Abstract

Autophagy is an important homeostatic cellular recycling mechanism responsible for degrading unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular organelles and proteins in all living cells. Autophagy is particularly active during metabolic stress. In the cancer cell it fulfils a dual role, having tumor-promoting and tumor-suppressing properties. Functional autophagy prevents necrosis and inflammation, which can lead to genetic instability. On the other hand, autophagy might be important for tumor progression by providing energy through its recycling mechanism during unfavorable metabolic circumstances. A central checkpoint that negatively regulates autophagy is mTOR, and anticancer drugs inhibiting the PI3K/Akt/mTOR axis putatively stimulate autophagy. However, whether autophagy contributes to the antitumor effect of these drugs or to drug resistance is largely unknown. The antimalarial drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine inhibit autophagy, leading to increased cytotoxicity in combination with several anticancer drugs in preclinical models. The therapeutic clinical roles of autophagy induction and inhibition remain to be defined. To improve our understanding of autophagy in human cancers new methods for measuring autophagy in clinical samples need to be developed. This Review delineates the possible role of autophagy as a novel target for anticancer therapy.

Key Points

  • Autophagy is a homeostatic cellular recycling mechanism that mediates removal of old or dysfunctional proteins and organelles, and is particularly important for cell survival during conditions of metabolic stress

  • Autophagy might have a dual role in cancer: it can allow cancer cells to overcome metabolic stress (hypoxia, lack of nutrients) or suppress tumor progression through degradation of oncogenic proteins

  • Autophagy is controlled by the Atg family of proteins and can be divided into several distinct phases; mTORC1 is a key regulator of autophagy signaling

  • Many anticancer drugs (such as inhibitors of mTORC1, the proteasome, or histone deacetylases) induce autophagy; whether autophagy enhances their antitumor properties or contributes to therapeutic resistance often remains unclear

  • Autophagy inhibitors such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine showed efficacy in combination with other anticancer drugs in preclinical models, and clinical studies are underway

  • Being a dynamic process, autophagy is difficult to measure; current detection approaches include electron microscopy and immunohistochemical methods, but the 'optimal' technique for clinical application remains to be discovered

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Figure 1: Regulation of autophagy.
Figure 2: Autophagy cascade.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Joann Aaron (The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA) for scientific review and editing of this article.

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All authors were equally involved in the research of data and writing of the article, provided substantial contributions to the discussion of content, and reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission and in response to editorial queries.

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Correspondence to Filip Janku.

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Supplementary Box 1

Mechanistic details of the autophagy machinery (DOC 47 kb)

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Janku, F., McConkey, D., Hong, D. et al. Autophagy as a target for anticancer therapy. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 8, 528–539 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2011.71

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