Treatment of Cancer by Induction of Autophagy

Abstract

    Autophagy is an adaptive evolutionary machine induced in all eukaryotic cells under different forms of cellular stimuli such as stress, amino acid, starvation and excessive loss in trophic factors and hormones to removes damaged organelles and proteins from cells and keep the cellular homeostasis. Since various diseases including cancer formed in response to dysregulation of autophagy, wide attention has been developed for understanding the ambiguous roles of autophagy in tumor suppression. Protein kinase A (PKA), 5’-AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) and mTOR complex 1 (mTORC1) are the main kinases that regulate this process. Targeting these kinases and other autophagy regulatory genes have been revealed an excellent result in the treatment of many resistance cancer cells such as breast and prostate cancer. This review will focus on the molecular mechanism, the main genes involved in the regulation of each step of autophagy, and how these genes have been targeted as a novel step in cancer therapy.