Tumors Make Their Won Blood Vessels

By Drs. David Niesel and Norbert Herzog It is well established that tumors can induce our own cells to form new blood in a process called angiogenesis. This supplies tumors with the nutrients and oxygen to support their growth. But in 1999, scientists hypothesized that tumor cells themselves can form blood vessels, a process called vasculogenic mimicry or VM. That started a fierce, but healthy debate about how tumors acquire their blood supply. Nearly 17 years later, a drug that targets VM has gone into clinical trials and if successful would go a long way in bolstering the case that this phenomenon contributes to tumor growth. It was in the early 1970's that Judah Folkman of Harvard Medical School hypothesized that tumors grow so large because they can trigger angiogenesis. He proposed to a skeptical scientific community that drugs targeting this process would starve tumors and be another approach to treating solid tumors. Several anti-angiogenesis drugs have come to market but the original optimism has been tempered by the fact that the drugs only slow tumor growth and often become resistant to these drugs. Could the alternative means of developing blood vessels, VM, account for the less than spectacular effects of anti-angiogenic drugs? In experiments, melanoma cells from rapidly spreading tumors were grown on a gel that mimics the extracellular matrix that is embedded in the body. The aggressive melanoma cells migrated through the matrices and "scrunched it up" formin...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news