Inhibiting autophagy tagged posts

Autophagy is required for the migration and invasion of metastatic tumor cells •Autophagy promotes the degradation of paxillin and focal adhesion turnover •Paxillin interacts with LC3B through a conserved LIR in a Src-regulated manner •Autophagy is required for Src-regulated tumor cell motility

Inhibiting autophagy effectively blocks tumor cell migration and breast cancer metastasis in tumor models. They demonstrate that the process is essential for tumor metastasis and describe the mechanisms that connect autophagy to cell migration. Metastasis is responsible for 90% of cancer deaths.

2 MD/PhD students working in MacLeod’s laboratory, Marina Sharifi and Erin Mowers, noticed that when they placed metastatic breast cancer cells on a dish and monitored them with time-lapse microscopy, ...