MMP12 and cancer: Previously, a high expression of MMP12 was found to be closely associated with the occurrence and progression of cancers at different sites, such as lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) (Lv et al., 2015), colorectal cancer (Yu et al., 2021), hepatocellular carcinoma (Guo & Jiang, 2022), cervical cancer (Lin et al., 2021), and breast cancer (Cheng et al., 2021).