Owing to trehalose's ability to induce autophagy and ameliorate various protein aggregation neurodegenerative diseases and our finding of TFEB as an autophagy inducer particularly of protein aggregates, we became interested in evaluating the effects of trehalose in the induction of macrophage TFEB, autophagy–lysosomal biogenesis and atherosclerosis. The gene discussed is TFEB; the disease is atherosclerosis.