Indeed, autophagy enhancing agents targeting AMPK (Patil et al., 2014), mTORC1 (Crews et al., 2010; Bai et al., 2015), BECN1 (Savolainen et al., 2014) and lysosomal glucocerebrosidase (Richter et al., 2014) have all been shown to increase α-synuclein clearance and to have a neuroprotective effect in animal models of PD. This evidence concerns the gene GBA1 and Parkinson disease.