History of angiogenesis

Abstract

The first use of the term angiogenesis was in 1787 by John Hunter, a British surgeon [1]. However, there were very few reports of tumor angiogenesis until almost 100 years later, and these were mainly anatomical studies. For example, the vascular morphology of tumors was studied in considerable detail beginning in the 1860s [2, 3]. By 1907, the vascular network in human and animal tumor specimens was visualized by intraarterial injections of bismuth in oil [4]. The vascular morphology was studied in both human and animal tumors in the first half of the 20th century, mainly to determine if vascular patterns could distinguish benign from malignant tumors, to understand the shedding of tumor emboli into the circulation, or to interpret the delivery of active agents into specific tumors [5-8]. © 2008 Springer US.