GDF11 and cardiac hypertrophy: Harper et al. (2018) found that GDF11 contributes to a dose-dependent reduction in interstitial fibrosis under pressure overload and attenuates pathological cardiac hypertrophy. In addition, GDF11 can blunt the development of heart failure by reducing cardiac fibrosis after myocardial ischemia reperfusion injury and inhibits liver fibrosis by regulating hepatic progenitor cells (Du et al., 2017; Dai et al., 2020).