CD68 and atherosclerosis: The consensus is that recruited monocytes will get activated in response to oxLDL into pro-inflammatory macrophages during atherosclerosis [1], we, therefore, analyzed gene expression of CD68 and MHCII. CD68 is a pan-macrophage marker and is up-regulated upon macrophage differentiation [90,91,92], while MHCII was found to be a marker for pro-inflammatory macrophages [25].