Therefore, at the tumor site, MMP-9 produced by cancer cells combines with that synthesized by normal inflammatory, immune, parenchymal or stromal cells; this leads to a dramatic rise of MMP-9 protein levels which is not paralleled by an increase in TIMP synthesis [11,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53]. Here, TIMP1 is linked to neoplasm.