Furthermore, the result of other works supported the above observations demonstrating a remarkable plasticity of circulating monocytes/macrophages, resulting in a ‘spectrum’ of activation states and other papers showed a downregulation of interferon-γ response and IL6/JAK/STAT3 pathway in SSc monocyte-derived macrophages, possibly describing a ‘SSc specific macrophage’ [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,40,41,42,43,44,45,46]. This evidence concerns the gene STAT3 and systemic sclerosis.