MTOR and diabetes mellitus: Ren et al. (2017) found that p53 pathway regulated cell apoptosis and played a vital role in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM). In the kidney of DN patients, the mTOR signaling pathway was inhibited and subsequently suppressed the autophagy, caused mesangial expansion and proliferation, eventually led to glomerular hypertrophy and kidney damage (Lu et al., 2019).