Previous studies using lung biopsies from IPF patients reported a diminution of autophagy (Patel et al., 2012; Araya et al., 2013) and some from animal model illustrated that TGF-β1 could mediate dysfunction of the autophagy response during lung fibrosis (Sosulski et al., 2015). The gene discussed is TGFB1; the disease is idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.