The role of autophagy for cancer treatment: A systematic review

Abstract

Autophagy is a highly conserved catabolic process that regulates nutrient deprivation and metabolic stress through lysosomal degradation. In addition, autophagy is also identified to regulate various processes such as maintaining cellular homeostasis, conserving genomic stability, immunity, inflammation and quality control. The dysregulation of autophagy promotes the development of various diseases such as obesity, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease and cancer. However, autophagy expresses a dichotomous role in cancer. During the initial stage of malignancy, autophagy acts as a suppressor. Nevertheless, in the established tumors, autophagy is exploited as an adaptive mechanism to support the growing energy needs induced by hypoxia and oxidative stress. Therefore, the prosurvival role of autophagy is prominent in advanced tumorigenesis. Despite its role in cancer, autophagy also significantly contributes to the cancer metastasis, maintenance of cancer stemness and anoikis resistance. Further, these findings speculate the need for inhibiting the prosurvival autophagy from augmenting treatment modalities. Recently, anti-autophagic therapies emerged as alternative approach for effective cancer treatment. Thus, in this review, we briefly discussed the dynamic function of autophagy in cancer and the key factors and pathways that mediate tumor-induced autophagy. Finally, we highlighted some of the target-specific antagonists that could harness against the prosurvival autophagy and could serve as effective cancer therapeutics in the future.