Some of these pathways were reported to be related to COPD, such as the mTOR signaling pathway (Houssaini et al., 2018), NF-kappa B signaling pathway (Wu et al., 2020), PI3K–Akt signaling pathway (Zhang et al., 2020a), and oxidative phosphorylation (Kim et al., 2015), demonstrating the reliability of the identified DEGs. The gene discussed is AKT1; the disease is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.