CCN2 and Hepatic fibrosis: Considering that diverse types of cells participate in the progression of liver fibrosis, and HPCs may play a particularly important role, we then investigated whether rapamycin modulates CTGF expression in two HPCs LE/6 and WB-F344 cells which were widely used as in vitro models for studying functions of HPCs (Nguyen et al., 2007; Ding et al., 2013, 2016; Wu et al., 2018).