High expression of CD147 and MMP-9 is correlated with poor prognosis of triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) patients

The aim of this study was to investigate expression of CD147 and MMP-9 in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) so as to determine whether these two proteins may be correlated with poor prognosis of TNBC patients. We examined the expression levels of the CD147 and MMP-9 in 127 patients with TNBC and 30 patients with mammary gland fibroma using immunohistochemical staining before any treatments. Furthermore, we analyzed the correlation between the expression of these two proteins and various clinicopathologic factors including survival status of patients with TNBC. Positive stain of CD147 and MMP-9 was observed in all samples of TNBC. A statistically positive correlation was observed between the expression levels of CD147 and MMP-9 in TNBC tissues. The incidences of high expression were 48.0 % for CD147 and 53.5 % for MMP-9 in 127 TNBC tissues, respectively. High expression of either CD147 or MMP-9 was significantly correlated with clinical feature and shorter progression-free survival (PFS) (P_CD147 = 0.039; P_MMP-9 = 0.017) and overall survival (OS) (P_CD147 = 0.037; P_MMP-9 = 0.023). The expression levels of CD147 and MMP-9 are positively correlated with invasion, metastasis and shorter PFS/OS of TNBC. Patients with high expression of CD147 and MMP-9 had poor prognosis than TNBC patients with low expression.