Among the identified candidate genes, the COL6A3 (Nance et al., 2014), COL7A1 (Horimasu et al., 2017), WNT5B (Malizia et al., 2009), and MMP3 (DePianto et al., 2015) have been demonstrated to be associated with pulmonary fibrosis. Here, MMP3 is linked to pulmonary fibrosis.