PTEN and Parkinson disease: Li et al. (2018) reported that miR-181b overexpression functioned to suppress cellular autophagy and reduce cellular damage in PD through the PTEN/AKT/mTOR pathway. Many researchers have since made similar findings, with Zhou et al. (2021) revealing that miR-221 had the same effect on 6-OHDA-induced PC12 cells.