IL1B and pulmonary fibrosis: Choi et al. (2020) demonstrated that IL-1β was also required to trigger the reprogramming of AEC2 during alveolar regeneration, but sustained IL-1β treatment hindered the generation of mature AEC1 via inducing expression of Hif1a and other glycolysis pathway genes. Thus, TGF-β/BMPs imbalance, or chronic IL-1β-induced inflammation may lead to epithelial cell failure and lung fibrosis (Gu et al., 2014; Lasithiotaki et al., 2016).