( A researcher at the University of Wisco...)New angiogenesis finding may help fight cancer growth

The finding may help halt tumor growth in cancer patients, says Emery Bresnick, the senior author on the study, a professor of pharmacology and member of the UW-Madison Paul P. Carbone Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The research, published in the Journal of Cell Biology on Sept. 25, is the first to connect a particular nervous-system chemical to the regulation of blood vessels.

Normally, blood vessels form when wounds heal and during menstruation, pregnancy and fetal development. But impaired blood-vessel development and function are also a major cause of blindness, and tumors rely on new blood vessels as they develop.

Like most critical body processes, angiogenesis is tightly controlled by multiple balancing mechanisms. When Bresnick and colleagues, including postdoctoral fellow Soumen Paul, began the new study, they were not looking into angiogenesis. Instead, they were studying a protein that regulates the maturation of blood cells, and noticed that it turns on a gene that makes a compound called neurokinin-B, or NK-B.

Aware that NK-B affects cells in the nervous system, Bresnick wondered, "Why would a protein involved in blood-cell formation turn on the gene for a compound that is supposedly involved in regulating the nervous system?"

The researchers searched for NK-B receptors - molecules that can "recognize" and respond to NK-B - and found great numbers of them on endothelial cells, which line the inside of blood vessels.

Endothelial cells form the internal structure of a blood vessel, and during angiogenesis, they migrate, starting an extension of the blood-vessel network. When Paul added NK-B to endothelial cells, "They lost the capacity to organize in three dimensions, to form the tubes tha
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Source:University of Wisconsin-Madison