Dramatically, lncRNA 9884 was a novel SMAD3-dependent non-coding RNA, highly expressed in the nuclei of TECs and MCs of db/db mice, which could directly modulate the expression of MCP-1 at transcriptional level and promoted the infiltration of leukocytes (Zhang et al., 2019d), the latter of which has also been observed in diabetic models and clinical samples of DKD (Galkina and Ley, 2006; Yang and Mou, 2017). Here, CCL2 is linked to diabetic kidney disease.