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. 2021 Apr 22;10(5):982. doi: 10.3390/cells10050982

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© 2021 by the authors.

Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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Illustration of the role of the macrophages and their highly flexible programming in tissue repair and fibrosis in several organs. Macrophages, because of their high flexibility, can play a key regulatory role in every stage that characterizes the tissue repair and fibrosis from the promotion to the resolution of the inflammation leading to the wound closure. The figure shows the principal events and principal molecules: chemokines, Matrix metalloproteinases, tumor necrosis factor-alfa (TNF-α), platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), transforming growth factor-beta 1 (TGF-β1), insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), vascular endothelial growth factor-alfa (VEGF-α), programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) and programmed death-ligand 2 (PD-L2), interleukin-10 (IL-10) involved in the process, highlighting the different phenotypic states that the macrophages can assume in the process. The blue net represents the extracellular matrix (ECM) that is produced by myofibroblasts after that fibroblasts or other cellular types differentiated into them.