AKT1 and diabetic kidney disease: TPL can protect the kidney by mitigating epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) of hexokinase (HK-2) cells through PI3K/Akt signaling pathway (Xue et al., 2018) and inhibiting Akt/mTOR signaling pathway, thus inhibiting the proliferation of glomerular tethered cells in diabetic nephropathy (Han et al., 2017).