Autophagy-inducing natural compounds: a treasure resource for developing therapeutics against tissue fibrosis.

Tissue fibrosis is a common pathologic change of many chronic diseases, which is characterized by extracellular matrix accumulation in tissues and dysfunction of the injured organs. Despite there recently gain mechanistic insight into the pathogenesis of tissue fibrosis, therapeutics for tissue fibrosis and thus many chronic diseases remain a significant clinical unmet need. Recent progressions indicate that autophagy, a conserved lysosomal degradation process in eukaryotic cells, not only plays an important regulatory role in maintaining cellular and tissue homeostasis, but also contributes to the development and progression of tissue fibrosis in a diversity of organs. Interestingly, a number of natural compounds derived from plant or Chinese Herb Medicines (CHM), have been identified as modulators of autophagy, and may function as potential therapeutic agents for the treatment of different fibrotic diseases. In this review, we focus on several plant natural compounds that have well-known anti-fibrotic effects through regulating autophagic signal pathways or autophagy activity. These findings should provide important therapeutic clues and strategy for the development of new anti-fibrosis drugs.