He et al. (2020) identified ATG12 was a target of miR-372-3p. ATG12 can promote autophagy and radiosensitivity in lung adenocarcinoma by suppressing miR-372-3p. Furthermore, we found that PTEN and mTOR exhibited a high correlation coefficient with autophagy. PTEN is an important tumor suppressor and the main antagonist of PI3K, which can promote the degradation of AKT (Lim et al., 2015; Jamaspishvili et al., 2018). In addition, miR-181 was found to mediate cisplatin-resistance and attenuate autophagy through the PTEN/PI3K/AKT pathway in NSCLC (Liu et al., 2018). Here, AKT1 is linked to non-small cell lung carcinoma.