Ravdin P M
Department of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio 78284-7884.
Breast Cancer Res Treat. 1993;24(3):219-26. doi: 10.1007/BF01833262.
The biologic rationale for the importance of cathepsin D in breast cancer is a provocative one. Cathepsin D is both an estrogen inducible and a constitutively produced protease, which may also act directly as a peptide growth factor. Thus it may play a role in tumor invasiveness, and also in driving cell proliferation. Reported clinical studies are conflicting, with some studies showing cathepsin D levels to correlate with clinical outcome, and other studies finding prognostic significance only in selected subsets of patients, if any. Thus cathepsin D is a potentially important prognostic marker whose clinical application awaits further definition.
组织蛋白酶D在乳腺癌中具有重要作用的生物学原理是一个引人深思的问题。组织蛋白酶D既是一种雌激素诱导型蛋白酶，也是一种组成型产生的蛋白酶，它还可能直接作为一种肽生长因子发挥作用。因此，它可能在肿瘤侵袭以及推动细胞增殖方面发挥作用。已报道的临床研究结果相互矛盾，一些研究表明组织蛋白酶D水平与临床结果相关，而其他研究仅在特定患者亚组中发现其具有预后意义（如果有意义的话）。因此，组织蛋白酶D是一个潜在的重要预后标志物，其临床应用有待进一步明确。
