SMAD3 and Hepatic fibrosis: Additionally, multiple signaling pathways, including Src/extracellular regulated protein kinases/drosophila mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 3 (Src/ERK/Smad3) (Huang Y. et al., 2023), Sirt1/Notch (Sun et al., 2022), ferroptosis (Huang et al., 2022), and phosphatase and tensin homolog (Geng et al., 2020) are all involved in the activation of HSCs and hepatic fibrosis.