Autophagy is deregulated in cancer, neurodegeneration, and many other human diseases. Around the globe, laboratories are revealing more and more mechanistic details on this versatile recycling machinery. “Autophagy currently enjoys star status”, writes IBC2 Director Ivan Dikic in his latest review on the topic.

Together with colleague Zvulun Elazar from Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel), he has now given a comprehensive overview of the medical implications of autophagy, published online in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology.

As so often in biomedicine, it is a story about unprecedented mechanistic insights, a huge dependency on context, an awful lot of crosstalk, and – last not least – an enormous potential for therapeutic intervention.
Link to publication via SharedIt. An access free version will also be available online on the journal’s website in June.