ABSTRACT
Plasminogen is a major plasma protein (Table 13.1) synthesized by the liver that circulates in blood at a high concentration (1500 nM). Plasminogen is an inactive serine protease or zymogen. e activated form of plasminogen, or plasmin, is the only enzyme responsible for the degradation of the major component of a blood clot, brin. A feature of plasmin is that it has relatively low specicity toward its substrates compared
Abbreviations 259
13.1Urokinase/Urokinase receptor system in fibrinolysis and cancer 259
13.1.1 Urokinase-type plasminogen activator 262
13.1.2 uPA receptor 262
13.1.3 uPAR in tumor metastasis 262
13.1.4Inhibitors of uPAR and bioimaging 264
13.2 ATF-based photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy and imaging 265
13.3 Summary 268
References 269
to typical proteases. us, plasmin was shown to be capable of degrading a number of extracellular matrices, for example, brin, bronectin, laminin, and collagen type VI. Plasmin also activates certain other proteases, for example, matrix metalloproteases, collagenases, and stromolysin-1 [1].
