LGALS3 and atherosclerosis: Recent scRNA-seq studies have demonstrated that contractile VSMCs undergo a mesenchymal-like transition, becoming similar to macrophages, which is associated with the development of atherosclerosis [20, 76, 77].The presence of these macrophage-like cells is indicated by LGALS3 and classical macrophage markers, with LGALS3 and CD68 being the most common ones [46, 78].