About this Research Topic
The role of autophagy in carcinogenesis remains poorly understood. Once thought to be merely a recycling process, autophagy is now recognized as a complex pathway with a plethora of crosstalks with cellular and molecular signaling.
Autophagy is a double-edged sword in cancer. Depending on the context, autophagy can provide genomic stability, elimination of ROS and oncogenic proteins, and even promote an immune response to tumors among other tumor-suppressive processes. On the other hand, once oncogenesis is initiated, autophagy enhances tumor development giving resistance to nutritional stress and avoiding cell death processes. Recent data implicate the autophagy pathway in several new processes with a high impact in our understanding of cancer biology such as tumoral microenvironment modulation, cancer immunology, non-conventional secretion, extracellular vesicles, stem cells and resistance to therapy.
The aim of this Research Topic is to present advances in understanding the roles of autophagy and autophagy-related pathways in the biology of cancer. We encourage submissions of Original Research and Review articles focusing but not limited to the following subtopics in the context of autophagy:
1) Resistance to therapy;
2) Cellular metabolism;
3) Tumoral microenvironment;
4) Carcinogenesis;
5) Extracellular vesicles;
6) Cancer immunology;
7) EMT (epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition);
8) Metastasis.
Autophagy is a double-edged sword in cancer. Depending on the context, autophagy can provide genomic stability, elimination of ROS and oncogenic proteins, and even promote an immune response to tumors among other tumor-suppressive processes. On the other hand, once oncogenesis is initiated, autophagy enhances tumor development giving resistance to nutritional stress and avoiding cell death processes. Recent data implicate the autophagy pathway in several new processes with a high impact in our understanding of cancer biology such as tumoral microenvironment modulation, cancer immunology, non-conventional secretion, extracellular vesicles, stem cells and resistance to therapy.
The aim of this Research Topic is to present advances in understanding the roles of autophagy and autophagy-related pathways in the biology of cancer. We encourage submissions of Original Research and Review articles focusing but not limited to the following subtopics in the context of autophagy:
1) Resistance to therapy;
2) Cellular metabolism;
3) Tumoral microenvironment;
4) Carcinogenesis;
5) Extracellular vesicles;
6) Cancer immunology;
7) EMT (epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition);
8) Metastasis.
Keywords: Cancer, Macroautophagy, Extracellular vesicles, Non-conventional secretion, Microautophagy, Chaperone-mediated autophagy, Pathways crosstalk
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
