Fig. 5

Schematic representation of the study flow. After successful induction of the iPSCs and the IPF mouse model, the iPSCs were injected via the tail vein, two days post bleomycin administration; on day 21, the histologic and molecular assessments were performed, and it was observed that besides alleviating the histologic features, iPSCs modulated the expression of the WNT pathway components which are known to contribute to the fibroblast transdifferentiation into myofibroblasts, although they exerted no effect on the reduced expression of the Bmp4 gene. BMP4 usually affects the WNT pathway by enhancing the expression of Dkk1