ACTA1 and Hepatic fibrosis: As shown in Figure 6b, overexpression of miR-9-5p and miR-221-3p significantly downregulated the mRNA levels of both α-SMA and Col-1α1, suggesting that both miR-9-5p and miR-221-3p can directly inhibit HSC activation and decrease procollagen transcription, and thus the observed inactivation of HSCs (Figure 5) and alleviation of liver fibrosis (Figure 4) by hMSCs overexpressing miR-9-5p or miR-221-3p may at least be partially attributed to the direct action of miR-9-5p and miR-221-3p.