In the process of exploring new drugs, up-regulation of autophagy has been found in numerous disease-model studies (Yang et al., 2018a; Rusmini and Cortese, 2019) and activation of the p62/Keap1/Nrf2 pathway has been shown to play a role in alleviating systemic diseases (Sun et al., 2016; Su et al., 2018) and in ameliorating brain injury, such as ischemic stroke (Wu et al., 2019). The gene discussed is NFE2L2; the disease is ischemic stroke.