An increasing body of evidence indicates that activation of PI3K/Akt and inhibition of GSK3β play a neuroprotective role in many brain injury models, including experimental ischemic stroke (Valerio et al., 2011), subarachnoid hemorrhage-induced early brain injury (Ma et al., 2016), traumatic brain injury (Zhang et al., 2018), and intracerebral hemorrhage (Chen et al., 2019b). Here, AKT1 is linked to ischemic stroke.