Clinical Implications of Circulating Angiogenic Factors in Cancer Patients

Abstract

Circulating VEGF seems to be a reliable surrogate marker of angiogenic activity and tumor progression in cancer patients. Evaluation of circulating angiogenic factors is a promising novel approach of prognostication in cancer patients that has the advantages of being convenient and noninvasive, and it may provide new prognostic information that is not afforded by conventional clinicopathologic prognostic indicators.

Vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 and downstream p38 mitogen-activated protein kinase are possible candidate markers of intrinsic resistance to adjuvant endocrine treatment in steroid receptor positive breast cancer

“…The results showed that patients with high intratumoral level of VEGFR2 were more prone to develop distant metastases, and had an impaired survival. A huge amount of publications have shown higher expression of the ligand, VEGF to be correlated with shorter survival times in several tumor types including breast cancer [23]. VEGFR2 is less studied and the data concerning the prognostic and predictive role contradictory.…”

Fibroblast growth factor/fibroblast growth factor receptor system in angiogenesis

“…However, no association between increased serum levels of FGF2 and tumor type was observed in later studies on a large spectrum of metastatic carcinomas even though two-thirds of the patients showing progressive disease had increasing serum levels of the angiogenic factor compared with less than onetenth of the patients showing response to therapy [200]. The clinical significance of circulating FGF2 in individual types of cancer has been recently reviewed [201]. Briefly, the levels of circulating FGF2 may have prognostic significance in head and neck cancer, lymphoma, leukemia, prostate carcinoma, and soft tissue sarcoma but they do not correlate with breast cancer progression and their significance in colorectal carcinoma is unclear.…”

Prognostic value of serum levels of interleukin 6 and of serum and plasma levels of vascular endothelial growth factor in hormone-refractory metastatic breast cancer patients

“…Additional biological parameters are therefore required to gain more accurate insight into the outcome of metastatic breast cancer patients. Recent cancer research has highlighted the importance of tumour neovascularisation in the initial and metastatic growth of cancer (Hanahan and Folkman, 1996) and there is solid evidence supporting the evaluation of tumour angiogenesis for prognosis in cancer patients (Poon et al, 2001). Thus, the assessment of angiogenic factor production may allow a better estimation of survival for patients with metastatic breast cancer.…”

“…Elevated serum levels of VEGF have been found in metastatic cancer patients. These levels have been correlated to the clinical course of the disease in several tumour types (Poon et al, 2001;Ugurel et al, 2001;Molica et al, 2002). As most serum VEGF is released from platelets during blood clotting, it has been suggested that plasma VEGF may be a better reflection of ongoing angiogenic activity, although this assumption has been challenged (Banks et al, 1998;Salven et al, 1999a;Wynendaele et al, 1999;George et al, 2000).…”