The urokinase type of plasminogen activator in cancer of digestive tracts

Plasminogen activators in endoscopic biopsies as indicators of gastrointestinal cancer: comparison with resection specimens

“…This phenomenon can be attributed to the presence of fewer t-PA producing endothelial cells in the superficial biopsies compared to the resection samples which were dissected at the muscular layer and contain relatively more mucosal tissue. In both cases, a strong increase of u-PA antigen was seen, while t-PA antigen remained unchanged, or was lower, when samples of adenocarcinoma were compared with the normal mucosa which corresponds with previous reports on resection specimens (Gelister et al, 1986;De Bruin et al, 1987a,b, 1988Kirchheimer et al, 1987;Nishino et al, 1988;Sim et al, 1988;Suzumiya et al, 1988 Taking biopsies by endoscopy is subject to sampling error, which increases when the suspected lesion is smaller, more difficult to discern from normal or of heterogeneous composition. To compensate for this, usually five to ten tissue samples are taken and all are histologically evaluated (Dekker & Tytgat, 1977).…”

“…In the colon and rectum, this change consists of a considerable increase of the urinary-type PA (u-PA) and frequently a concomitant decrease of the other PA, tissue-type PA (t-PA) (Gelister et al, 1986;De Bruin et al, 1987a, b, 1988Kirchheimer et al, 1987;Nishino et al, 1988;Sim et al, 1988;Suzumiya et al, 1988). It has been shown that in the precursor lesion of colonic adenocarcinoma, the adenomatous polyp, t-PA is at the same level as in carcinomas, while u-PA levels are intermediate to those in normal colonic mucosa and carcinoma (Gelister et al, 1986;De Bruin et al, 1987a;Suzumiya et al, 1988).…”

“…ELISA for t-PA t-PA antigen was measured essentially as described by Rijken et al (1984), with minor modifications. Rabbit anti-t-PA was used as catching antibody, anti-t-PA-horseradish peroxidase conjugate (Biopool, Sweden) as second antibody and 3, 3', 5, 5'tetramethylbenzidine was used as substrate.…”

Contribution of plasminogen activators and their inhibitors to the survival prognosis of patients with Dukes' stage B and C colorectal cancer

“…Because of the fact that these PA parameters could discem patients at high risk of developing recurrent disease or having a poor survival in the node-negative group, they already form the basis for selection of patients for further treatment with chemotherapy. Also, high levels of u-PA, PAI-I and PAI-2 have been found in carcinomas of the stomach and oesophagus (Nishino et al, 1988;Takai et al, 1991;Tanaka et al, 1991;Nakamura et al, 1992;Sier et al, 1993b). Moreover, recent reports of Nekarda et al (1994), Heiss et al (1995), and our group (Ganesh et al, 1996) have shown that these parameters are of prognostic value for the survival of patients with gastric cancer, PAI-1 being an independent prognostic factor.…”

Up-regulation of urokinase-type plasminogen activator in squamous cell carcinoma of human larynx

“…In particular, several malignant tumours, e.g. carcinoma of the colon (Kohga et al, 1985;De Bruin et al, 1987a, b;Sim et al, 1988;Nishino et al, 1988;Pyke et al, 1991), lung Sappino et al, 1987), breast , uterus (Whitney et al, 1985;Sugimira et al, 1992), urinary bladder (Hasui et al, 1989;1992) and skin (Sappino et al, 1991), express high levels of uPA compared with normal tissue. Numerous findings indicate that uPA is involved in tissue degradation during invasive growth by promoting breakdown of extracellular matrix proteins either by a direct action of plasmin or through a plasmin-mediated activation of latent collagenase (Ossowski et al, 1983(Ossowski et al, , 1988Mignatti et al, 1986;Saksela and Rifkin, 1988).…”