BAX and renal fibrosis: Similarly, a number of publications have demonstrated that emodin retarded renal fibrosis by modulating several pathways, such as TGF-β/Smad, TGF-β/BMP-7, PI3K/Akt/GSK-3β, and Bax/caspase-3 signaling pathways (Jing et al., 2017; Ma et al., 2018b; Yang et al., 2020; Liu et al., 2021c).