Scientists Find Way To Control Cells’ ‘Waste-Clearing’ System, Opening New Avenue For Cancer And Parkinson’s Research

New Delhi, October 1, 2026: Scientists have found a way to manipulate the natural “waste-clearing” system inside cells, an advance that could help researchers better understand its role in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease.

The study, involving researchers from the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology (CSIR-IGIB) and the National Institute of Immunology in New Delhi, Ashoka University in Sonepat and the University of California Los Angeles in the US, showed that the cellular cleansing process known as autophagy can be deliberately increased or reduced.

How Cells Take Out Their Trash

Autophagy is the process through which a cell clears or recycles unwanted material. It creates a cavity called an “autophagosome”, which acts like a recycling bin. A lining forms around cellular debris, allowing the unwanted material to be broken down and its components reused for energy or new growth.

One trigger for autophagy is intermittent fasting. After long periods without food, lower levels of glucose and amino acids signal the body to conserve energy. The word “phagy” comes from Greek and means “self-eating”.

The researchers studied the behaviour of a protein called LC3, which is involved in autophagy. Using simulations, they tracked the protein and found that it changes shape when it touches the inner surface of the cell’s “recycling bin”.

Computational analysis followed by experiments showed that two mutant forms of LC3 produced sharply different results, with autophagy becoming very high in one and very low in the other.

The researchers designed a series of mutations that could either “activate autophagy in a hyper-efficient way or switch it off”. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Why Cancer And Parkinson’s Matter

“Autophagy is significantly linked with neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson’s disease, and cancer,” said Lipi Thukral, corresponding author of the study, computational biologist, senior principal scientist and associate professor at CSIR-IGIB and the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR).

Autophagy has a complex role in cancer. Studies have shown that it can suppress tumour growth by preventing damaged material from accumulating. At the same time, it can help cancer cells survive, including by helping them develop resistance to anti-cancer agents.

In neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, impaired autophagy can contribute to toxic clumps of proteins accumulating inside cells, which can eventually cause cell death, PTI reports.

The ability to deliberately turn this cellular cleansing mechanism up or down therefore gives scientists a potentially useful tool to investigate what happens when autophagy changes during disease.

“This is a study largely to say that autophagy, a cell’s cleansing process, can be a very relevant therapeutic target. It can now be modulated, and anything which can be changed, you can study it in the disease condition. Because the moment you switch it off, you can now see what is happening in cancer or Parkinson’s disease,” Thukral told PTI.

She stressed that the current research is fundamental in nature, although its next stage could have therapeutic implications. The researchers have also filed international patents for the engineered proteins.

Could Engineered Proteins Become A Therapeutic Tool?

Thukral proposed that an engineered LC3 protein could potentially be delivered into cells using lipid nanoparticles. Researchers could then study how increasing or reducing the body’s ability to perform autophagy affects a disease.

Lipid nanoparticles are also part of the technology underlying mRNA vaccines, Thukral said. Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines, widely used against Covid-19, carry genetic instructions that tell cells to produce a harmless part of a pathogen, training the immune system to fight the actual infection.

Thukral is now working with collaborators in Germany and the UK to test programmable autophagy in cancer cells and Parkinson’s disease.

A ‘Magic Wand’ For Cellular Garbage?

Ravi Manjithaya, an autophagy researcher and professor and chair of the molecular biology and genetics unit at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, described the research as a “tour de force” combining computational analysis with rigorous experimental validation.

“It is almost like having a magic wand to clear the garbage in Bengaluru. If you understood where the bottleneck was and could directly target it, you can imagine how effectively the city could be made garbage-free,” Manjithaya told PTI.

“Now, at the molecular level, if you had a way of bringing the autophagy machinery directly to the garbage and accelerating its clearance, you would be doing something truly remarkable,” he said.

Manjithaya, who has studied autophagy for more than two decades, said the paper explains how cellular waste clearance could be made more efficient.

“It is therefore a tour de force study, not one that relies solely on computational predictions, but one that takes the findings through the entire spectrum of structural analysis, biochemical validation and cellular experiments,” he said.

Neurodegenerative Diseases Could Be Key Test

According to Manjithaya, neurodegeneration is among the most immediate areas where the approach could have implications. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s involve the accumulation of misfolded proteins or damaged mitochondria, the energy-producing structures inside cells.

He also pointed to the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in computational structural biology.

“With the advent of AI/ML, computational structural biology is increasingly accessible even to scientists who are not specialists in the field. This creates an exciting test bed for generating a large number of new hypotheses based on how we interrogate and interpret biological structures,” Manjithaya said.

Thukral said advances in biological data and computing infrastructure were increasingly coming together to enable meaningful discoveries.

“When biology data and compute infrastructure align so beautifully, then we can have really meaningful discoveries. That’s what is happening in the current era. In a lot of ways, we are entering an era where it is predicted that we’ll solve diseases at a greater pace,” she said.

Promising Tool, But Therapeutic Potential Still Ahead

The study is significant because it gives researchers a way to experimentally manipulate a basic cellular process that is linked to several serious diseases. Rather than establishing a new treatment, however, the work provides a tool that could help scientists investigate what happens when autophagy is enhanced or suppressed.

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Its potential therapeutic value will depend on what subsequent research finds when the approach is tested in disease models. Thukral said pharmaceutical partners could eventually take the work forward for therapeutic applications, making the innovation available for wider public benefit.

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