Paracrine signaling by infected epithelial cells may nevertheless constitute a means by which infection induces fibrotic activity in fibroblasts not directly accessible to Chlamydia. Indeed, a recent report demonstrated that conditioned media derived from HEK-293 cells expressing constitutively active YAP could induce myofibroblast differentiation via the action of the YAP target CTGF (Chen et al., 2020). This evidence concerns the gene CCN2 and infection.