Copyright © 2003 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels, has become a broad subject and is a very active area for current research. This paper describes the main biological events involved in angiogenesis and their importance in cancer progression. In the first section, a fundamental overview of tumour biology is presented. In the second section, the biology of healthy blood vessels is described and, in the third section, the mechanisms of cell migration and proliferation, which are crucial to angiogenesis, are discussed. In the fourth section, a detailed account of tumour-induced angiogenesis is given, whilst the pro- and anti-angiogenic factors involved are reviewed in the fifth section. Finally, the processes of tumour invasion and metastasis are examined in the sixth section.