ACTA1 and pulmonary fibrosis: EMT is a critical pathological process in pulmonary fibrosis, manifested mainly in the transformation of epithelial cells into fibroblasts, leading to a downregulation of the expression of the epithelial marker E-cadherin and an upregulation of the mesenchymal phenotypic markers N-cadherin and α-SMA (Rout-Pitt et al., 2018; Miao et al., 2022).