Expression Of Legumain Correlates With Prognosis And Metastasis In Breast Cancer

In recent years, the increasing incidence of breast cancer has become a danger to the woman’s health. Although some progress was made in comprehensive treatment for breast cancer, there is no effective marker to predict recurrence and metastasis of breast cancer. And there is no good targeting chemotherapy drugs, it is common that patients unable to tolerate chemotherapy side effects and influence the situation of the treatment of breast cancer. Therefore, it become an urgent problem in the clinical treatment of breast cancer to explore effective biomarkers and predict therapeutic targets.In our study, we found that the asparagine peptidase(Legumain) was high expression in breast cancer tissues and low expression in normal tissues. And overexpression of Legumain is correspond with poorer prognosis, but there was no large amounts of data about the relationship between Legumain with the clinical pathology and molecular classification of breast cancer. Secondly, overexpression of Legumian enhance invasion and metastasis ability of breast cancer cell lines, but the mechanism was unclear. So we choose breast cancer tissues and cell lines to study the relationship between Legumain and clinical pathology and the mechanisms of invasion and metastasis in high expression of Legumain cell lines.We use immunohistochemical to find the expression of Legumian in breast cancer tissues and adjacent carcinoma tissues. We concluded that the expression of Legumian is high in breast cancer tissues and low in adjacent carcinoma tissues. The high expression of Legumain is related with the number of lymph node metastasis,clinical stage, PR expression and the molecular classification. The higher expression of Legumain, the poorer prognosis is. In breast cancer cell lines, we use Western Blot and RT-PCR to conclude that the expression of Legumain in the triple negative cell lines are higher than Luminal cell lines. Through establishing over-expression of Legumian cell lines, we conclude that Legumain can promote invasion and metastasis ability and may related with EMT. Through WB, if we overerpress Legumain in breast cancer cells, the epithelioid marker like E-cadherin and ZO1 could down regulation, the mesenchymal marker like N-cadherin and Vimentin could up regulation.