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Thrombosis Research 129, Supplement 1 (2012) S80–S84 PL-15 The protein C pathway in cancer metastasis C. Arnold Spek a, *, Valder R. Arruda b a Center for Experimental and Molecular Medicine, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands b The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Keywords: Cancer is frequently associated with activation of blood coagulation, which in turn has been suggested to pro- Protein C mote tumor growth and metastasis. Indeed, low molecular weight heparin treatment significantly prolongs APC the survival of a wide variety of patients with cancer. Based on this notion that anticoagulant treatment seems Coagulation to benefit cancer patients, recent experiments aimed to elucidate the importance of the natural anticoagulant Cancer protein C pathways in cancer progression. Interestingly, these experiments showed that the repeated admin- Metastasis istration of exogenous activated protein C limits cancer cell extravasation in experimental animal models. In line, reducing endogenous activated protein C activity dramatically increased the number of experimen- tal metastasis. These data thus strongly suggest that exogenous activated protein C administration may be a novel therapeutic avenue to limit cancer metastasis thereby prolonging overall survival of cancer patient