Thymidine phosphorylase promotes metastasis and serves as a marker of poor prognosis in hepatocellular carcinoma.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) ranks as one of the most common and lethal malignancies worldwide. A better understanding of the mechanism responsible for HCC metastasis will be helpful for the treatment of HCC patients. Thymidine phosphorylase (TP), a key enzyme that catalyzes the conversion of thymidine to thymine and deoxyribose-1-phosphate, was demonstrated to promote the invasion and metastasis of HCC in our study. Clinical retrospective analysis revealed that metastatic HCC tumor tissues have higher TP expression, and TP expression was significantly correlated with matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) 2 and 9 expression. Survival analysis revealed that TP expression was negatively correlated with the prognosis of HCC patients. Moreover, in vitro cell experiments confirmed that TP could promote the migration and invasion of HCC cells. In addition, MMP2 and MMP9 were activated by TP overexpression. Overall, this study suggests that TP promotes metastasis and may serve as a marker of poor prognosis in HCC. Thus, TP is a potential target for the treatment of HCC.

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