Noteworthily, some of them have been already proposed to be involved in IPF: for instance, S100A4 was found elevated in the lungs of IPF patients and expressed by α-SMA-positive cells (53), or midkine has been recently chosen by machine learning models as a potential prognostic tool for IPF (54). This evidence concerns the gene S100A4 and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.