Seeking Cellular Fitness and Immune Evasion: Autophagy in Pancreatic Carcinoma.

In a recent Nature paper, Yamamoto et al. demonstrate that, in the particular context of pancreatic carcinoma, autophagy causes the continuous destruction of major histocompatibility complex class I (MHC-I) proteins. Suppression of autophagy favors MHC-I re-appearance on the surface of malignant cells, facilitating their clearance by cytotoxic T lymphocytes.