Both IL-6 and IL-22 mainly induces STAT3 in hepatocytes and subsequently induces transcription of many genes that exert many important functions as indicated in the figure. IL-6 and IL-22 also activate many other signaling pathways (such as STATI, STAT5, AKT, MAPK, AMPK etc) but to a much lesser extent. The action of IL-22 is mediated by binding to the heterodimeric receptors of IL-10R2 and IL-22R1 with the latter one mainly expressed on epithelial cells. The function of IL-6 is mediated by binding to the IL-6R and its signal chain gpl30, both of receptor and signal protein are ubiquitously expressed. Thus IL-6 has much broader effects than IL-22 that mainly targets epithelial cells including hepatocytes.