Autophagy is a highly conserved cellular process for degradation of bulk cytoplasmic materials in response to starvation and maintenance of cellular homeostasis. Dysfunction of autophagy is implicated in a variety of diseases including cancer. In a recent study, we devised a system for inducible deletion of an essential autophagy gene Rb1cc1/Fip200 in established tumor cells in vivo and showed that Rb1cc1 is required for maintaining tumor growth. We further investigated the role of the accumulated SQSTM1 in Rb1cc1-null autophagy-deficient tumor cells. To our surprise, the increased SQSTM1 was not responsible for the inhibition of tumor growth, but rather supported the residual growth of tumors (i.e., partially compensated for the defective growth caused by Rb1cc1 deletion). Further analysis indicated that SQSTM1 promoted tumor growth in autophagy-deficient cells at least partially through its activation of the NFKB signaling pathway. A working model is proposed to account for our findings, which suggest that targeting both autophagy and the consequently increased SQSTM1 may be exploited for developing more effective cancer therapies.
Keywords: SQSTM1; autophagy; mouse models; targeted cancer therapy; tumor growth.