EGFR and familial pancreatic carcinoma: Consistent with this, a western blotting assay (Figure 4D) also showed that the autophagy biomarkers LC3-II and BECLIN protein increased upon treating the pancreatic cancer cells with Huaier; besides, we also found that Huaier decreased the levels of P-EGFR and P-ERK and had the opposite effect on P-ULK/Ser317 (Figure 4D), which suggested the autophagy induced by Huaier may be a multiple process, such as inhibition of EGFR/ERK pathway (a demonstrated autophagy inhibition pathway that is induced by Huaier in other tumours (20)) and activation of AMPK pathway.