Increased expression of MMP-9 and IL-8 are correlated with poor prognosis of Bladder Cancer

MMP-9, MMP-2 and its specific inhibitors expression levels were analyzed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) in fresh-frozen malignant tissue collected from 40 patients with BC submitted to transurethral resection of bladder. The control group consisted of normal bladder tissue from five patients who had undergone retropubic prostatectomy to treat benign prostatic hyperplasia.MMP-9 was overexpressed in 59.0？% of patients, and MMP-2, TIMP-1, TIMP-2, MMP-14, RECK and IL-8 was underexpressed in most of the patients. Regarding prognostic parameters we observed that high-grade tumors exhibited significantly higher levels of MMP-9 and IL-8 (p？=？0.012, p？=？0.003). Invasive tumors (pT1-pT2) had higher expression levels of MMP-9 than superficial tumors (pTa) (p？=？0.026). The same was noted for IL-8 that was more expressed by invasive tumors (p？=？0.015, p？=？0.048). Most importantly tumor recurrence was related with higher levels of both MMP-9 (p？=？0.003) and IL-8 (p？=？0.005).We have demonstrated that the overexpression of MMP-9 and higher expression of IL-8 are related to unfavorable prognostic factors of urothelial bladder cancer and tumor recurrence and may be useful in the follow up of the patients.Bladder cancer (BC) is the second most common malignancy of the urinary tract. Approximately 383,300 new cases are estimated for 2011 world-wide [1]. Ninety percent of BC are urothelial carcinomas, previously named transitional cell carcinomas, and the majority are papillary low-grade, non-muscle invasive that recur in up to 80？% of cases but rarely progress to muscle invasion [2]. In contrast, 10 to 20？% of tumors are muscle invasive at diagnosis, and 50？% of patients die from metastatic disease [3]. The molecular pathways of BC have been investigated to identify new potential markers for diagnosis, disease monitoring, prognosis and development of new targeted therapies [2,3].Degradation of basal membranes and the extracellular matrix (ECM) is essentia