IL6 and pulmonary fibrosis: Various investigations have revealed that Thal prevents bleomycin- or paraquat-induced pulmonary fibrosis in murine models by downregulating the expression of IL-6, IL-8, IL-1β, TNF- α, TGF-β, collagen, hydroxyproline, VEGF, p-JNK and α-SMA (Tabata et al., 2007; Choe et al., 2010; Amirshahrokhi, 2013; Liu et al., 2014b; Dong et al., 2017).