Animal experiments showed that inhibition of KLF5 expression alleviated foot cell injury in diabetic neuropathy (Zhang et al., 2021b), Runx1 promoted TGFβ1-induced kidney fibrosis in mice by upregulating the PI3K pathway (Zhang et al., 2021c), STAT1 phosphorylation inhibited the M1 phenotypic transformation of macrophages and suppressed DN progression (Zhang et al., 2019), and WT1-induced apoptosis in diabetic nephropathy podocytes by activating the p53 pathway (Zhang et al., 2021d). Here, KLF5 is linked to diabetic kidney disease.