Targeting Autophagy In Disease: Recent Advances In Drug Discovery

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Small molecules targeting autophagy have been highly implicated as new therapeutic agents to treat diseases of interest. With the increasing demand for autophagy-targeting drugs, this review attempts to provide an efficient strategy to explore major autophagy-based human disease interventions with newly explored mechanisms using small molecules and promising therapeutic approaches.

Areas covered

Introduced in this review are direct links and applications among autophagy pathways, their modulators, and phenotypic diseases, along with recent approaches. Autophagy-related diseases, machinery, and compounds are introduced to guide the appropriate investigation of autophagy in the pharmaceutical industry. The authors then provide their expert perspectives on the subject.

Expert opinion

The self-catabolic intracellular process autophagy occurs in organisms throughout their lifetime, supporting its critical role in organismal health across life stages. Because of the detrimental influence of dysfunctional cells to an organism and their etiology in numerous diseases, maintaining cellular quality control by recycling components through autophagy is essential to prevent health decline.

KEYWORDS:

• Autophagy
• autophagy-related diseases
• autophagy-targeting strategy
• cancer
• proteopathies
• vascular diseases

Declaration of interest

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea, funded by the Korean government (MSIP; 2015K1A1A2028365, 2015M3A9B6027818, 2016K2A9A1A03904900, 2018M3A9C4076477), the Brain Korea 21Plus Project in the Republic of Korea and ICONS (the Institute of Convergence Science), Yonsei University.