"About 40 papers a week are coming out [on angiogenesis]; it is a very fast-moving field," says Judah Folkman, professor of pediatric surgery and cell biology at Children's Hospital in Boston. "Ten years ago, people thought all new capillaries were the same, but now we know they're not."
According to Laura Shawver, president of Sugen, the company that initially developed SU5416 and was later acquired by Pharmacia, "[Angiogenesis] wasn't studied from the drug development perspective until the '90s." SU5416 targets the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) receptor. When VEGF was discovered in 1989, it was the first factor known to be specifically involved in the proliferation and migration of blood vessel precursor cells. Subsequently, labs began focusing on VEGF inhibition. However, at that time, it was less understood that as tumors progress, they express an increasingly broad array of pro-angiogenic growth factors. "In the first generation of angiogenesis inhibitors that ...
