IF YOU want to stop a leak in your kitchen, would you cut off the water
supply to the whole neighbourhood? Probably not. Yet that’s the kind of approach
being tried with experimental anti-cancer drugs that block the growth of blood
vessels.
These drugs prevent “angiogenesis” throughout the body, not just in tumours.
But now Napoleone Ferrara and his team at Genentech in California have found a
protein that promotes angiogenesis only in hormone-producing glands. Although
the protein promotes rather than inhibits angiogenesis, the discovery is causing
excitement because it suggests there may be ways to block blood-vessel growth in…
