Study encouraging for ischemia treatment. (Report from Europe).

A short exposure to a specific combination of two growth factors may be all it takes to stimulate the growth of new blood vessels that persist indefinitely, a new study suggests. Yihai Cao, professor of vascular biology at the Laboratory of Angiogenesis Research at the Karolinska Institute (Stockholm, Sweden), said, "This is what everyone has been hoping for. We have shown that it is possible to grow functional and stable arterial blood vessels in ischemic tissues, which persist in animals for more than a year even once the growth factors have been withdrawn."

Cao and colleagues at Karolinska, together with collaborators in the U.S. and France, reported their findings in a …