Advances in the research on human tissue factor pathway inhibitor / 国际生物医学工程杂志

ABSTRACT

Human tissue factor pathway inhibitor (TFPI) is a member of the Kunitz-type serine protease inhibitor family, which is divided into TFPI-1 and TFPI-2. The key function of TFPI-1 is anticoagulate, while TFPI-2 is a broad-spectrum serine protease inhibiter. Both of them are composed of three repeated Kunitz-type domains. Even though sharing some structural homology, they are quite different from each other in terms of the coding sequences, tissue origins and distribution, the functions and the mechanisms involved. These differences between TFPI-1 and TFPI-2 lead to the discrepancies in the roles they played in a variety of physiological and pathological processes. The recent progress in the related research is reviewed in this article.