Our previous study showed that overexpression of PBX1 significantly attenuated HF-MSC senescence and apoptosis through activation of the downstream phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/protein kinase B (AKT) (PI3K/AKT) signalling pathway (Jiang et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2020b). Here, AKT1 is linked to hydrops fetalis.