Author(s)

Yucheng Bi, Zhuocheng Zhang

Corresponding Author

Zhuocheng Zhang

ABSTRACT

Autophagy is the natural, conserved degradation of cell that removes unnecessary or dysfunctional components through a lysosome-dependent regulated mechanism. Therefore, the cell can prevent the accumulation of toxins or unnecessary components that leads to damage of the cell and recycle these components to sustain metabolic homeostasis. In mammalian cells, there are mainly three types of autophagy. They are microautophagy, macroautophagy and chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA). Macroautophagy is the most widely used type of autophagy, thus most of the autophagy we talked about is macroautophagy. Multidrug resistance (MDR) is an unavoidable issue after long‐term chemotherapy, resulting in refractory cancer and tumour recurrence. Fortunately, autophagy as a self-degradative system has the potential to be utilized as a possible treatment for cancer. In the following essay, the mechanism and function of autophagy in cancer cell will be discussed. In cancer specifically, autophagy plays a dichotomous role, as it can inhibit tumour initiation, but it supports tumour progression. Recently autophagy has been approved to treat several diseases including cancer, in order to provide safe and efficient therapeutics that controls autophagy, a thorough understanding of the mechanism of autophagy with a special focus on druggable targets (GEMMS) will be fully discussed in the paper.

KEYWORDS

autophagy, mTOR, cancer, GEEMs, inhibition