Cancer Metabolism and Autophagy

Autophagy is the process of self-disruption of the cell in order to clean up damaged or unnecessary proteins and organelle and to balance energy resources in response to nutritional stress. In tumor cells that are damaged by the mechanism of apoptosis, autophagy prolongs the survival time of the cell. However, autophagy may provide tumor suppression in the early stages of tumor formation. In this case, induction of autophagia may be beneficial in the prevention of cancer. In this review, the autophagy is presented with a general view on the effect of autophagy on the tumor tissue dependence compared to normal tissues and on the metabolism in tumor formatio