It's an idea that the pharmaceutical industry has embraced. According to a recent Business Communications Company report1; angiogenesis drugs are expected to be a $2.4 billion market by 2006. The report estimates that 300 angiogenesis inhibitors for cancer treatment strategies are being developed and that another 30, designed to simulate blood vessel growth to fight cardiovascular diseases, are in the works.
Control doesn't necessarily include tumor shrinkage, according to Gerald Batist, head of the oncology department at McGill University in Montreal. "In animals, when you give them angiogenesis inhibitors, tumors shrink. We don't think that's going to happen in humans. There have been thousands of people treated with various anti-angiogenic molecules and there have been very few examples of tumors shrinking. Most often what we see are lots of patients ... where the investigator says, 'These patients with metastatic lung cancer have all lived more than a year, more than ...
