MMP12 and osteoarthritis: Liu et al. reported that RA synovial tissue contained higher levels of MMP-12 messenger RNA compared to osteoarthritis synovial tissue [32], and Wang et al. demonstrated that overexpression of MMP-12 in transgenic rabbits significantly enhanced arthritic lesions, resulting in severe synovial thickening, pannus formation, prominent macrophage infiltration at an early stage and a marked destruction of articular cartilage at a later stage [33].