AKT1 and COVID-19: Furthermore, it has been shown that COVID-19 infected patient tissues and epithelial cells exhibit the abnormally activated mTOR signaling pathway, as evidenced by increased levels of phosphorylated 4E-BP1, AKT, S6K1 and mTOR (Appelberg et al., 2020; Mullen et al., 2021), suggesting the relevance of mTOR signaling activity and SARS-CoV-2 infection.