The histopathological features in the tendinopathy distant from the hemi-transection site in equine SDFT, mirror those commonly reported in diseased human tendon[15,16,26,48,51], as do most of the gene expression changes: decreased MMP3[48,51–55] and TIMP3[52–55], and increased MMP14[48], ACAN and BGN[30,51,53,55], and COL1A1 and COL3A1[48,51,53,55]. The gene discussed is MMP3; the disease is disease of the tendon.