AKT1 and Parkinson disease: In addition, as Akt positively regulates mTORC1, it would be possible that mTORC2 also acts as a negative regulator of autophagy (Jung et al., 2010) Accumulating data also highlight the crucial role of mTOR-dependent signaling pathways in neurodegenerative diseases, including Huntington’s disease (HD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD; Sarkar, 2013), as its pharmacological inhibition by rapamycin attenuates the accumulation of misfolded/aggregated proteins and protects against neuronal loss, in vivo and in vitro (Ghavami et al., 2014).