PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - LUJUN CHEN
AU  - DONGMEI DI
AU  - GUANGHUA LUO
AU  - LU ZHENG
AU  - YAN TAN
AU  - XIAOYING ZHANG
AU  - NING XU
TI  - Immunochemical Staining of MT2-MMP Correlates Positively to Angiogenesis of Human Esophageal Cancer
DP  - 2010 Oct 01
TA  - Anticancer Research
PG  - 4363--4368
VI  - 30
IP  - 10
4099  - http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/30/10/4363.short
4100  - http://ar.iiarjournals.org/content/30/10/4363.full
SO  - Anticancer Res2010 Oct 01; 30
AB  - Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) play an important role in the pathological processes of degradation of extracellular matrix and destruction of basement membrane, which leads to tumor invasion and metastasis. In the present study, we investigated membrane-type 2 MMP (MT2-MMP) expression pattern in esophageal cancer tissues collected from 103 patients, and explored MT2-MMP expression pattern in correlation to patients' clinicopathological features, intratumoral angiogenesis and postoperative prognoses. The intensity of immunochemical staining of MT2-MMP was significantly positively correlated to the intratumoral angiogenesis of esophageal cancer tissues. Positive MT2-MMP immunoreactions were found in 85.4% of total tumor sections, whereas none or very weak MT2-MMP staining occurred in normal esophageal tissues. In addition, MT2-MMP immunochemical intensities were significantly correlated to tumor size, but not to patient's gender, age, invasion depth, lymph node metastasis and distant metastasis. Moreover, MT2-MMP levels could not be applied for predicting patients' survival rate although the H-score cut-off value showed the overall survival rate of patients with low MT2-MMP protein level to be better than those with high MT2-MMP protein level.