CTSD and cancer: Gao et al. (2017) identified that cepharanthine could induce autophagy, apoptosis and cell cycle arrest in cancer cells. CEP has been found to induce autophagy-related cell death in several cancer cells, acting by blocking autophagosome-lysosome fusion and maturation of cathepsin B and cathepsin D (Tang et al., 2018; Mijanović et al., 2019), or by blocking the Akt/mTOR signaling pathway to induce autophagy and apoptosis in tumor cells.