Immunochemical Staining of MT2-MMP Correlates Positively to Angiogenesis of Human Esophageal Cancer

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.