Pro-survival autophagy: An emerging candidate of tumor progression through maintaining hallmarks of cancer

Autophagy is an evolutionary conserved catabolic process that regulates the cellular homeostasis by targeting damaged cellular contents and organelles for lysosomal degradation and sustains genomic integrity, cellular metabolism, and cell survival during diverse stress and adverse conditions. Recently, the role of autophagy is extremely debated in the regulation of cancer initiation and progression. Although autophagy has a dichotomous role in the regulation of cancer, growing numbers of studies largely indicate the pro-survival role of autophagy in cancer progression and metastasis. In this review, we discuss the detailed mechanisms of autophagy, the role of pro-survival autophagy that positively drives several classical as well as emerging hallmarks of cancer for tumorigenic progression, and also we address various autophagy inhibitors that could be harnessed against pro-survival autophagy for effective cancer therapeutics. Finally, we highlight some outstanding problems that need to be deciphered extensively in the future to unravel the role of autophagy in tumor progression.