Resistance of cancer cells to current chemotherapy is a significant problem in cancer treatment, and the development of new agents to kill death-resistant cancer cells is highly desirable. Because the modulation of autophagic processes can be therapeutically useful to circumvent chemoresistance and enhance the effects of cancer treatment, the identification of novel autophagic enhancers for treatment of cancer is highly desirable. Recently, Chair Prof. Liu Liang, Dr. Wong Kam Wai, Dr. Law Yuen Kwan and their colleagues from the State Key Laboratory of Quality Research in Chinese Medicine (Macau University of Science and Technology, MUST), have identified a group of natural compounds isolated from TCM that function as novel autophagic enhancers. These active compounds could induce autophagy and autophagic cell death in a panel of death-resistant cells. These research findings provide novel insights into the biological functions, mechanisms and potential therapeutic values of TCM compounds for killing drug-resistant or death-resistant cancer cells, which may be therapeutically useful to enhance the efficacy of current chemotherapeutic agents. The novel finding has just been published online in “Scientific reports” on 1 July 2014. The page views including the HTML views and PDF downloads approach 1900 times upon the first month of online publication, which is ten times more compared to other articles in the same category (http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140701/srep05510/metrics).Scientific Reports is a primary research article from the publishers of Nature, covering all areas of the natural and clinical sciences. The newly released Impact Factor for Scientific Reports is 5.078 (Thomson Reuters, 2014).
