Angiogenesis Is Coming of Age

Correspondence to Werner Risau, PhD, Max-Planck-Institut für physiologische und klinische Forschung, W.G. Kerchoff-Institut, Parkstrasse 1, D-61231 Bad Nauheim, Germany. E-mail WRisau@kerckhoff.mpg.de

Key Words: angiogenesis • inflammation • Thy-1

Angiogenesis, the formation of blood vessels from preexisting vessels, occurs during embryonic and adult life.¹ Although vascular endothelial cells in the normal adult organism have a very low turnover, they resume proliferation in diseases that are associated with neovascularization, such as solid tumor growth, wound healing, and retinopathy.² A host of recent publications has indicated that the molecules and mechanisms involved in both embryonic and adult angiogenesis are similar.^{1 3 4} For example, neutralizing or deleting the function of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)^{5 6 7} or its receptors (VEGF-R1/flt-1^{8 9} and VEGF-R2/flk-1/KDR^{10 11} ) abolished embryonic and adult blood vessel formation, including vasculogenesis, the formation of blood vessels from angioblasts in situ,¹² and adult physiological (eg, in the corpus luteum) and pathological (eg, in tumors) angiogenesis. Therefore, one could propose that adult angiogenesis merely recapitulates embryonic angiogenesis. This view is now challenged by Lee et al,¹³ who, in this issue of Circulation Research, present the first evidence that adult angiogenesis may require additional factors and mechanisms. They found that Thy-1 was upregulated in newly formed blood vessels in four models of angiogenesis in adult rats, whereas it was not expressed during vasculogenesis or angiogenesis in the embryo. Notably, the four models included both pathological (tumor, balloon injury, and ligation of renal artery) and physiological (uterine vessels during pregnancy) angiogenesis. One of the conclusions from the work of Lee at al is therefore that embryonic vascular endothelium differs from adult vascular endothelium.

There is precedence for differences between "young" and "old" endothelium. Adult endothelium has . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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