CGAS and pulmonary fibrosis: Zhou et al. showed that HNK significantly alleviates the aging of alveolar type II epithelial cells (ATII cells) by activating SIRT3, which in turn enhances the activity of SOD2 activity, regulated the cGAS/STING and NF-κB signaling pathways, significantly alleviated the aging of ATII cells, protected mitochondrial DNA integrity, and thus effectively prevented pulmonary fibrosis and mitochondrial damage (Zhou et al., 2024).