Hold That Line: Angiomotin Regulates Endothelial Cell Motility

The modern era of angiogenesis research is generally considered to have begun with the proposal by Folkman 1971 that tumors release diffusible factors that promote the formation of new blood vessels. Although there has been interest in this topic for 30 yr, the last 6–7 yr have seen an explosion of interest in this field. This explosion is evidenced in the number of meetings on the topic, the number of press reports, and especially the number of publications. A search of the Medline database reveals that in 1990 approximately 200 papers were published on the topic of angiogenesis, whereas in the year 2000 more than 1,700 papers appeared on the same subject. To what can we attribute this rise? My own feeling is that while the previous two decades were devoted to proving that angiogenesis was a real biological...