To grow and divide, pancreatic-cancer cells must devour their own contents — an Achilles heel that could render them susceptible to the antimalaria drug chloroquine.

'Autophagy' is the regulated degradation of cellular structures and molecules. Alec Kimmelman of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues found that pancreatic-tumour cells have high levels of autophagy. When the researchers reduced expression of the protein ATG5, which is required for autophagy, pancreatic-cancer cells showed signs of stress, including DNA damage and altered metabolism.

Furthermore, reduced expression of ATG5 or treatment with chloroquine, which inhibits autophagy, shrank tumours and lengthened survival time in mice that had received transplanted pancreatic-cancer cells.

Genes Dev. doi:10.1101/gad.2016111 (2011)