Transautophagy: Research and Translation of Autophagy Knowledge

There is an urgent need to understand the process of autophagy in health and disease. Increasingly, human age-related diseases, such as cancer and neurodegeneration, as well as the great variety of metabolic disorders are found to correlate with significant alterations in both autophagy activity and capacity. However, implementing novel therapeutic treatment opportunities for combatting age-related human pathologies by targeting autophagy is unsatisfactorily slow. One of the reasons for this is that autophagy methods that can precisely monitor autophagy activity and capacity in vivo are currently nonexistent. Moreover, molecular details with regard to the complex regulation of autophagy in health and disease are still poorly understood. As a consequence, applying personalized medicine for targeting autophagy in patients suffering from age-related human diseases is still an unfulfilled aim.